Horse Latitudes

by Morris Collins

  Soto shrugs again and waves vaguely toward the children. The canoe banks and turns and heads out into the deeper moving waters with the dip and splash of paddles, one of the children coughing then ceasing then coughing again, and all of them disappearing downriver in the phosphorescent glow of their silent, diminishing wake.

  In the morning Mirabelle served the workers before they headed out again into drying cane. There was less and less of it, it seemed. The men talked of blight, the foreman insisted on drought, but with cholera at the river, disease in the cane, rumors again of guerrillas in the mountains and roadblocks on the eastern roads—the men grumbled increasingly about the Mormons.

  Mirabelle looked on all of them, as she worked, with a cold pity. Last night on the patio, she had made her decision. She packed her one small bag in the last watches before dawn. She did not have many clothes and she took even fewer. She would find clothes enough in America; she would find Yolanda. Into her bag she placed her Indian rosary, her English Bible and journal, a photograph of Jose posing with several of his friends in the cane, and a green beaded brooch that had belonged to her mother. She did not take any of Yolanda’s remaining possessions. Yolanda must have everything now that she could want—and Mirabelle did not need any mementos to remember her sister. Besides, she would be seeing her soon.

  So, for the last time, she cooked for the men and smiled and watched them eat and talk and drink coffee before stepping out through the open door, out into the heat and empty streets, the drying cane and their own waning lives, of which Mirabelle had never had a part and now would flee for good.

  Let them live here, she thought, and God grant them grace. Let them continue to work and live, let the Lord find them temperance and peace, and Lord, let me leave. She imagined Soto, his terrifying strangeness, his alien beauty, and then—guiltily, because it came second—the orphans she would serve, the life she would live as if it had always been calling her, sounding from across the sea or someplace closer still, Soto coming down over the mountains with her miserable charges, calling her from before her birth, from her conception on the island, a life waiting like the Mother in the shadows, the revelation in the portent—a world forming just beyond her perception.

  Unlike Rosa, who had enjoyed serving the men and talking and bussing plates, Mirabelle took some pleasure in the cooking.

  “Do you remember my mother’s hands?” Rosa had said. “Swollen and rough as starfish. Do I want that? What man would want that?”

  But the men had seemed perfectly interested in Rosa. Mirabelle heard two of them speaking about her once in the street.

  “I know she’s only twelve,” one said. “But I don’t know how much longer I can control myself.”

  Control yourself? thought Mirabelle. Of course you cannot. One had no control. The world acted through you and all you could do was obey. When he calls, you must answer. Perhaps this was blasphemy, certainly it was, but what had she ever chosen? Her mother chose to leave; maybe Yolanda did too. She had no idea what choice Jose made to get himself killed and no one would tell her. Always, men whispered around her, but they did not change their conversations. She felt a sick jealousy when she heard them speak like that of Rosa, and now that Rosa was dead, her jealousy had not abated. It still rose in her like bile when Mr. Bernal wept against her neck, her bare collarbone. At night she seethed and turned and watched as the Mother thumbed Her rosary and nodded Her blue feathers and did not speak.

  After the men left she washed the plates and made more coffee. Soon Mr. Bernal would wake and wander down to the café. He would stand in the street a moment as he always did, like a stunned thing. He would turn a circle in the dust and stare at the sun—a man looking for a sign, a flock of birds, a star in impossible diurnal ascent, some sad and soothing augury. When he didn’t find it he would look down and blow his nose in the street, he would cough and step inside. He would say good morning, Mirabelle. He would never inquire about business. And today, when he turned his gaze from the sun and stepped forward into a moment for him whose curse would be that it was like all those that preceded it, he would enter the café to a new loss. But at least, she thought, she could leave him clean dishes and fresh coffee.

  Mirabelle picked up her bag from behind the counter. She could hear the coffee brewing and the sun, now breaking over the red pine scrub mountains in the east, came hot and slanted into the café. Already, she was sweating. She wiped her face, she checked her hair in the side mirror. She was not vain. Nor, she thought, was she pretty. But still, Soto would be here soon. She’d have to do. Whatever that meant. She tied her hair up with a red cloth. Hopefully she did not appear wanton. When the two gringos entered she turned away from the mirror and toward the door.

  They stepped inside and stood uncertainly on the threshold, spread-legged and sweat-smelling, purposeful as the angels in the cathedral glass at Qultepe, ones perhaps attended by trumpets, messengers like Soto, come for her. The one who entered first, a step ahead of the other, looked as many gringos did in Copal. Not unattractive, handsome certainly, but with skin unintended for this climate—his face boiled into a dark leathery red, a Marine’s buzzed hair, bright blue eyes. And the other, thin and sweating, fair also and darkly tanned, but still unburnt. He wore a sweatshirt tied like a belt around his waist, sunglasses too big for his head—so many, it seemed, wore sunglasses—and a black t-shirt with odd golden epaulets. They both were ridiculous.

  “Good morning,” the first one said. “Is this the only café in de Caña?”

  She nodded, still holding the bag.

  “We’re closing,” she said in English.

  They looked at each other as she spoke and then down at the bag. They did not seem surprised by her English.

  “Well, we’re hungry,” said the first one, the one who looked like an American Marine from the old airbase. “We’ve been traveling since before dawn. Over the mountains in a pickup truck. All we want are some baleadas and coffee.”

  “Some coffee would be really good,” the other one said.

  When she didn’t move, when she stood there, he looked again at her bag. The sunlight fell like a sash across his absurd golden epaulets, his black shirt. He still wore his sunglasses.

  “Permisso,” he said. “I mean, excuse me. But are you going somewhere?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “Where did you learn English?” he asked.

  “My sister taught me. She lives in America.”

  “Of course she does,” he said, and took off his sunglasses, opened his eyes wide to the sudden change of light. They were also blue and bleary and bloodshot. He was probably drunk.

  “Look, Mirabelle,” he said. “I’ve seen your sister. I mean, I know her. I’m telling you because, really, that’s why we’re here. Yolanda sent us. I’m supposed to bring you to her because, Mirabelle, you are in a lot of danger.”

  ETHAN WATCHED HER FACE as he spoke Yolanda’s name. If there was a lie, if there was some trick afoot, she’d betray it here and now. He was looking for wonder and surprise and he got them both: wide eyes, open mouth, a word caught there, unvoiced. Slowly, with a sadness inappropriate to the action, she placed the bag back on the floor, and he knew then that she was packed to leave, that they’d almost missed her, that Soto had been here and would return.

  “Has a man come to see you?” he said. “Has he asked you to go with him?”

  She nodded and Doyle shifted behind him, looked out through the open door to the empty street.

  “You have met Yolanda?” Mirabelle said. “You know her from Miami?”

  So that was what she believed, Ethan thought. That her sister had made it to America, to Miami. They had planned to take it slower, feel her out—but till this point he had botched every part of his delivery. Maybe he would not to wreck this.

  “Not Miami,” he said. “Texas.”

  It was a small lie, barely a lie at all. Hopefully she was not testing him.

  “Oh,” the girl said. “I did not know.
Maybe that is why I have not heard from her?”

  Doyle stood and walked to the door. He looked outside. Ethan did not like his nervousness. Doyle had passed through the roadblock with ease, but the packed bag on the floor haunted the room like a genie’s lamp. Ethan considered the situation again and again and he could only reach one conclusion. For whatever reason, they had converged here—he and Doyle, Mirabelle and Soto. There was no other way to see it. About this one thing Yolanda must not have been lying: Soto was coming.

  “This guy,” he said. “This man who’s coming for you. You cannot go with him. That’s why Yolanda sent me.”

  “He’s going to take me to America,” she said. “To minister to the orphans. He has a place for me and he has called me by my name.”

  Yolanda had said, my sister is different. She’s gifted somehow. Or blessed. Now, though, Ethan saw this blessing for what it was: the hard, cold line of it, the small twitching thing at the edge of the void. He knew it as he knew the perfect photo on a page of similar takes, as he knew Samantha’s infidelity: a combination of elements shuddering into form. The dull tone of Mirabelle’s voice, its lack of affect that had nothing to do with the fever in her eyes. The meaning she placed in a meaningless gesture: he has called me by name. He had seen this look hundreds of times on the demented passengers of New York’s subways and recognized it now for what it was—the certainty of the mad.

  The expression dissipated, a passing fit. Again she looked like an eighteen-year-old girl, confused, as she should be, beyond measure.

  “Mirabelle,” Ethan said. “Mirabelle, I promise you that whatever he’s coming for it will not be that. There will be no orphans. There will be no America. It doesn’t work that way. It’s simply not legal. Besides, you don’t have a passport, do you?”

  He watched her face and saw that she did not need convincing. She looked down at the floor, at the bag there, her booted feet. She sighed. So she’s not an idiot, anyway, he thought.

  “How far is the river?” Doyle asked from the doorway.

  “About two miles. Downhill.”

  “Okay,” he said, still staring at the horizon, the empty hills there and the roads leading to the jungle, the jungle that gave way to the Rio Sulaco. “Let’s get walking.”

  “So, what?” Mirabelle said. “I am supposed to go with you? With two Anglo men? This one—” She nodded at Ethan.”—is drunk.”

  Doyle turned away from the door. He had produced an open flask of guaro.

  “Chica,” he said, “we’re both drunk, and not as drunk as we should be. Personally, I don’t care what you do. I mean, who wouldn’t want to stay here? This place looks great. Driving in, I saw a horse that was almost alive.”

  This was a strange side of Doyle. A change from the self-righteous exaltation of Copal’s devastation. It’s good to know, thought Ethan, that fear makes us all nasty.

  “That wasn’t a horse,” Mirabelle said. “That was a donkey.”

  “Are you telling me I don’t know a dying horse when I see one? Are you saying that maybe I can’t tell a donkey from a horse? Because if anyone’s confused here, it’s you.”

  “I feel confused,” Mirabelle said. “I feel very confused.”

  Ethan saw Samantha standing in the doorway, under the hard sunlight. I felt ashamed, she said. I felt very ashamed. He put his sunglasses back on and picked up Mirabelle’s bag. He would not leave this mad girl’s salvation in her own hands.

  “I promised Yolanda,” he said. “I promised your sister that I would bring you to her and bring you to America.”

  He placed his hand on her shoulder and felt her shudder and move against his touch. Really, she was just a girl, and Soto was out there somewhere, on the road.

  “Was it a vow?” she asked. “Did you take a vow?”

  “Yeah, it was kind of like a vow,” Ethan said.

  Mirabelle took a step toward the door, and when it came easily, she took another. Ethan let her shoulder trail away from his outstretched fingers, out toward it, the impossible future.

  She stopped.

  “Wait. How are you going to get me into America if Soto could not?”

  “I’m going to bring you to your mother’s island. Your sister sent a passport there.”

  “Oh,” Mirabelle said. “Of course she did.”

  DOYLE FIGURED the Mormons were their best bet. They had built their ministry just off the road on the banks of the Sulaco. Fashioned from Honduran pine and quarried stone, trellised and arched and steepled, it was ridiculously ornate, a weird thing, an enchanter’s castle magicked onto the bank of the sickly river. Down the road, up the road, across the river, the sun glinted off the tin roofs of the neighboring shanties. If anyone had a boat to spare or sell, it would be the Mormons.

  They stood before the church, the immensity of it rising above the stand of gum and ceiba trees, the wild bananas and shade palms. Somewhere a dog began to yap.

  “Look at that,” Ethan said. “They’ve painted their fretwork white. They went to all that trouble and then painted it the same color as everything else.”

  “That’s what bothers you here?” Doyle asked. “That’s what really gets to you?”

  “Hey,” Ethan said. “My reach is vast. I can comprehend and comprehend and comprehend. There’s no sorrow beyond my sounding.”

  Mirabelle appeared, by any measuring, a tad stricken. If she had fantasies of escape, they probably did not go like this. Ethan uncapped the half-drunk flask of guaro and emptied it onto the ground before the church.

  “See, I consecrate the ground. I strengthen my will.”

  He wasn’t sure if the impulse to discard the guaro was noble or simply aggressive. Hello, Elder Smith. Let me christen your doorstep, let me assuage your flock.

  “Now then, we come seeking favors,” Doyle said.

  The door opened before they knocked as if the man had been standing behind it all day waiting for the knock. He was dressed as they all were, everywhere. The pleated black pants, the white shirt ruined by heat, melting hair gel seeping like a film of wax down his face.

  “Welcome to our church,” he said. “Come in and have a Sprite.”

  When he spoke Ethan could tell that he was younger than he looked. His voice came high and tremulous, screechy almost. He sounded excitable, nothing like the friendly antifreeze diction of the missionaries who’d come to your door, all smiles and expectation.

  “I’m sorry,” Doyle said. “We’re in a hurry. We have an emergency.”

  “Yeah,” the missionary said. “An emergency, huh? That’s no good.”

  “It’s the girl, Mirabelle—” He nodded toward her.”—from the town. Her sister is very sick. Dengue with complications, and we need to get to the coast.”

  The kid nodded and pursed his lips into a tight pout. They were thinner than lips should be, only a trace of lip, not red at all.

  “That’s not good,” he said. “I got dengue. When I first came here. Dengue right off the bat. I thought, wow, is this a test?”

  “And was it?” Ethan asked.

  “Say what?”

  Apparently it was a turn of phrase, not a question. Ethan wondered if he had known that all along. He had been aware for days now of his own growing anger. It started in Mexico and had been steadily rising. It was not tempered for long by despair or fear or alcohol. Despair and fear were constant, but fluctuating and assuaged by rum or guaro. The anger, though, did not tremble or modulate. It came and came, it blossomed in his sleep, it was not slaked.

  “You asked if it was a test. You asked if dengue, a fever carried by mosquitoes in these heathenous climes, was a test. So I’m asking: was it?”

  “I don’t know,” the Mormon said. “Surely.”

  Ethan smiled, nodded.

  “Perhaps it’s the Indians who carry dengue. Not mosquitoes. I don’t remember now.”

  Doyle pushed forward, between them.

  “Sorry,” he said. “He’s kind of ill. He’s kind of in distress. I think
we all are. Can you help us?”

  The Mormon stepped away from the door as if to invite them in. Beyond him, the church looked blue with shade, unlit. The windows were boarded closed, and from inside wafted the distinct smell of pine and incense.

  “You really should come in. If you want help, I need you to come in.”

  They stepped inside, Mirabelle and Ethan and Doyle following, stopping a moment and looking over his shoulder at the road behind them, empty still.

  The Mormon closed and locked the door. They entered a wide foyer with high rafters and darkness broken only where a few slashes of light came through the boarded windows. Dust whirled in the light and a bird called from somewhere in the shadows. The incense hid the smell of chicken feathers and mold, but not completely.

  “John,” the Mormon called, his voice even louder and screechier inside. “John, we have visitors.”

  Outside something banged, a high metal report, a pot, perhaps, being slammed against a cooking tin. John’s footsteps were heavy and slow, and when he opened the back door and flooded the church for a moment with glaring light, Ethan heard him mumbling to himself.

  He staggered as he walked, took long, wide strides, strides far too long for his body, like a man clown-walking in oversized shoes. Even in the dark Ethan could see that his clothes were in disrepair. His shirt, torn and soiled with mud, clung too tightly to his body. He did not wear the uniform black pants, but shorts instead. His shoes were black, unmatching Oxfords.

  “Well, brother,” he said. “You have guests, Andrew?”

  “John,” said the other Mormon, Andrew. “This girl is from the town. You’ve seen her before. Her sister has dengue.”

  “Dengue,” John said, and began to scratch the right side of his face. “Well, it comes in these parts. It’s kind of ubiquitous.”

  He smiled, though there was no reason for him to smile, and leaned his left arm against the wall. He continued to scratch his face and Ethan remembered the young policeman from the roadblock with the shifty feet and psychopath’s grin. With John’s entrance, the room had begun to thrum with the buzz of insects. Flies flitted through the rays of falling sun. The room stank—the hot rot of the river attended John. We have come to a crossways here, Ethan thought, where all are mad. The hermits in the forest, the questing knights, the maidens in the castle on the hill.