She looked up at him from her cereal. Already, even before breakfast, she was wearing lipstick.
“What?” she said. “What are you thinking now?”
He was thinking of how it used to be that she’d come out of the shower in the morning with her hair in a towel and glasses on because she hadn’t put her contacts in yet; how he’d come up behind her, hand her her coffee and kiss her neck and her collarbone and her shoulders, how her damp skin would taste, how her hair where it escaped the towel in black strands would smell like lavender and raspberries. He was thinking that now she stepped out of a shower like that was all she needed to step out of. He was thinking that now her contacts were already in and she didn’t smell like anything at all.
Somehow he’d become loathsome to her. He’d felt her loss for some months and now he felt it surely, without hope, a thing in distinct retrospect. Well then, he thought. If that’s how it’s going to be.
“I had an affair. It’s over now,” he said.
He had not expected her to drop her coffee. He had not expected her to start crying. The sound was horrible, childish and small. He wanted to take her in his arms, to unsay what he need never have said.
“How could you do that?”
“She was a medievalist,” he said.
“Is that supposed to be some kind of answer?”
“I don’t know how it happened.”
“Oh, you don’t?” she said. Her weeping had given way to anger. “Was it some marvel? A strike of blue lightning? A chaste conjoining?”
“Do you think,” he wondered, “that I never wanted anything? That I did not need love or understanding? Are you the only one afflicted?”
“This is starting to sound very much like an excuse,” she said. “A rationalization.”
“When you look into the mirror, you see a bottle.”
“Of course,” she said. “It all comes back to that. Forget your jealousy. Your fits and rages. It all comes back to your wanton, intemperate gash.”
Her anger was something to behold. It was the first emotion he’d seen from her in months. He could move toward it like heat.
“I’m not saying it wasn’t a mistake. I’m not saying it was out of my hands. But I was lonely. I don’t know how it happened.”
“No, Ethan,” Samantha said, and picked up her bag, stepped to the door. “Take your own advice, your own cold certainties. You make choices, boy, and then you account for them. The rest is pretty much bullshit.”
He raised his camera as the door closed and caught her shadow trembling on the threshold. That night when she did not come home, he called Mallory and went out into the odd red storm. The dwarf snarled in Spanish. Somewhere Samantha thrashed against whatever waited in the darkness. The phone rang and rang and Ethan did not know who could be calling.
In the night there was a sound on the river. One boat, maybe two, making for them. As suddenly as Ethan heard it, the wall of mist behind them began to glow, to radiate light from its center like a pearl: the boats had their bow lights on and were closing fast.
“Doyle,” Ethan said, but Doyle was already up and on his knees and looking back at the light gaining on their wake.
“Fuck,” he said. “You didn’t hear them coming?”
“I hear what you hear. It was just Night Sounds of the Freaky Jungle, and then it was this.”
Doyle looked back again as if staring at the mist would make it any more diffuse. The sound of boat engines and wave of lights still approached.
“They must have come out of one of the tributaries or hunting camps,” he said.
Doyle swung around and took the wheel and throttle from Ethan. He pulled the throttle into full and the boat coughed and bounced and jumped forward. Ethan sat next to Mirabelle and watched the mist.
“I don’t suppose the Blessed Virgin has any advice?” he asked.
“She gives commands,” said Mirabelle. “She gloats. She doesn’t offer advice.”
Ethan found the rum bottle and opened it, raised it to his lips, even though he could feel by the weight that it was empty.
“Doyle, I have an observation to make,” he said.
Doyle didn’t turn. Again the river narrowed, the fronds from the bank hung down to the water like frail horses coming to drink. Without their lights the mist remained unbroken, thick and gliding toward them.
“We can’t outrun them,” Ethan said. “It’s not going to happen.”
Doyle turned and looked back. A white heat centering, brightening into nebulous form. The pulsing outline of four bowlights. Above the blare of engines, the sounds of men’s voices. He killed the engine and pulled the boat toward the right bank, the alleys and mangroves there. He dropped anchor and it didn’t fall far. The bankwaters were shallow with silt and tree roots, false bottoms.
“I think it’s too shallow in the mangroves. Or at least too narrow,” Ethan said.
Doyle watched their wake dissipate and roll on behind them.
“They might not have heard us,” he said. “They might not know we’re out here.”
He opened his bag and pulled his wallet and passport from it.
“Get your valuables, both of you. We’re going for a swim.”
“I don’t swim well,” Mirabelle said.
“You grew up on a river.”
Mirabelle looked over the side at the dark water curling around their hull, the bending eddies issuing from the mangroves, the ripples under the surface.
“We don’t swim in this river,” she said.
THEY SWAM AS HARD AS THEY COULD into the tributaries bisecting the mangroves. Mirabelle splashed and floundered, her feet caught again and again in the tangle of silt and river weeds, her head dipped below the surface and she came up coughing.
“She can’t do that,” Doyle said. “She has to be quiet.”
Ethan held out his right arm and let her latch onto it.
“Come on,” he said. “I’ll pull you. Hold your head out of the water and keep your feet moving.”
As a boy he’d made a sport of fording rivers in flood, swimming or wading, letting the current pull him from boulder to boulder, boulder to far shore. Though the Sulaco was nothing like those cold, clear New England rivers, he knew what the dangers would be: if you let your feet rest in the silt of the river bottom they’d break through the thin false layer and grab in the settled marl. You’d be stuck before you realized it, you’d start to sink as you’d started to struggle. Then, of course, there was everything else he had no experience with: caimans and crocodiles, the filthy, tepid water.
They swam on into the dark inlets between the mangrove islands where the water ran loam-thick and warm, and weeds caught and tangled around their heels, snaked across their calves. They swam and the water luminesced about their feet and hands so that as they moved green auras arced out from their bodies in bursts and trailed behind them in slow, lessening flickers. They swam, the three of them, through the film of lagoon water where fish nudged their thighs and strands of half-rotten bog weeds washed up on their own moving current and slicked against their lips. They swam and Mirabelle coughed and river weeds slimed with algae brushed their faces and left warm green-gold light glimmering there with lingering, impossible luster, and because they glowed and the bow lights on the open river grew closer, imminent now, they continued on through the mist and underwater light into the farther dark.
Finally they stopped and turned and waited, treading water, as deep into the shadowed lee of the mangrove branches as they dared.
“Shouldn’t we get under cover?” Ethan whispered. “We’re still kind of in the open.”
Doyle looked behind them into the cypress and jungle canopy.
“I think those banks are pretty well populated by caiman,” he said.
“Mirabelle,” Ethan said. “Lie on your back. Float that way. You’re pulling too much on my arm.”
He helped her roll over and placed one hand on her lower back to keep her afloat. Her skin was slick with sil
t. On the open river the boats broke through the curtain of mist. They appeared low and wide, spectral, as they cut their engines and pulled up astern of the abandoned Evinrude. The men on the boats called to each other in no language Ethan knew. They whistled and coughed and gestured through wavering silhouettes in nervous mimings. From the deck, they shone handheld lights into the boat and twirled them a few times through the near mangrove thickets. Two men cocked their automatic rifles and, lit by bow lights, boarded the empty boat.
“Will they take it?” Mirabelle said.
Ethan touched his finger to her lips and when he removed it her lips pulsed a wet neon. River weeds glowed in her hair and on her chin; her lips shone and dimmed again into darkness. The water ran warm and thick against Ethan’s body. His fever, which had broken in the night, came again upon him in a wave of incandescence. Mirabelle glowed and floated and the weeds dimmed to brown mud-streaked tendons in her hair.
The men searched the boat, they tossed the bags and emptied them onto the deck. They shook their heads and played their hand lamps over the near mangroves one more time before leaping up into their own boats and roaring on again into the night.
After the men left, Mirabelle began to cough and would not stop. When they swam back to the boat and climbed inside and laid out their wet wallets and passports and found what dry clothes they had, Ethan held her against his chest and let her shiver and cough and look out into the last of night at whatever visions haunted her there. He used his sweatshirt as a towel and dried her and let her shudder against him and then pull away, still holding his sweatshirt, and lie down on the damp plastic cabin floor. Doyle drove and once Ethan looked up and caught his eye. Doyle shook his head and glanced away.
“Yes?”
“Hey, man, I’m just the driver,” Doyle said.
Ethan followed his gaze, over and past the sleeping girl and the boat prow cutting the water, up and straight ahead beyond the breaking mist and the river unveiling into dawn, past the last blue stars revolving away into the low horizon and falling toward the ocean that pressed toward them, even now, at the wide, sick end of the river.
DAWN ON THE SULACO. New mist rising and new bird cries and the drip of syrupy light coming through the trees. Ethan stood at the bow and pissed into the water. With the mist and the light came the heat, and he took off his shirt and put on his sunglasses and drank a bottle of agua purificada.
“Have some water, Mirabelle,” he said.
“I don’t want any water. If I need water, I will take it.”
“You know, Mirabelle, if you need to go to the bathroom, we will turn away. We won’t look.”
“Leave her alone and get some sleep,” Doyle said. “When was the last time you really slept?”
Two days, Ethan thought. At least. He drifted off several times in the back of the pickup on the way to Rio de Caña, but that was it. He should probably take Doyle’s advice and shut up and go to sleep. Let Mirabelle fend for herself, let Doyle care for him. He had been wrong after all about boating through the night. It was because of him that they had met the pirates or drug traffickers or whatever they were in the dark. Certainly, they could all easily be dead by now. But of course they weren’t and these things did seem to have a momentum of their own. At this point it was best not to question his impulses. No right choice could have led him here, and still here he was in the boat on the river that was widening again, heading toward Roycetown and the sea. His hands shook around the water bottle. He braced it against the boat and slowly turned the cap. Mirabelle watched him from the prow bench where their belongings dried in the sun.
“Hey, Mirabelle,” he said. “Did you know you had a passport?”
She looked away from him, down at the passports and wallets, pesos, quets, lempiras and dollars laid out, drying and cracking in the heat.
“I don’t know,” she said. “My birth certificate was sent to me right after Yolanda left.”
“Yolanda sent it to you?”
“I guess so,” she said.
Her nose was small and knobby in profile. Round and widening at the base, like the stump of a felled tree. Not Yolanda’s nose at all.
“Hey, Mirabelle,” he said again. “Whose nose do you have? Your father’s or your mother’s?”
She touched her face, the bridge of her nose, and jerked away from him as if shocked. Again, some flowering menace in his tone that he did not intend.
“I never knew either of my parents,” Mirabelle said. “My father ran off before I was born and my mother went to be with him.”
“I thought your parents were dead?”
“Dead?” Mirabelle said. “I don’t think so. That’s not what Jose said. I never knew my mother. But why would she leave us if my father were dead?”
Doyle shook his head, wiped his face, and looked behind them again at their empty wake.
“Raise your hand if you think we’re being fucked,” he said.
BY MIDDAY THEY HAD PASSED beyond the river’s realms of empty jungle. They came upon abandoned villages and villages in the process of being abandoned. They saw Indians packing up their homes, carrying what possessions they could on their backs, loading them into motorboats that idled on the river. Rainbow skins of leaking oil spread out behind the engines. There did not seem to be any children.
“It’s the fish,” Mirabelle said. “They’re all poisonous and strange. They have several heads.”
Now there were many boats on the river. On the banks, docks went to rot from weather and disuse, rows of stilt houses with tropically painted shutters and mansard roofs—once a whole river colony—decayed under the weight of uncleared foliage, sprawling vines of pulpy flowers, and rotten banana fronds. Iguanas basked on the sagging porches that leaned, as the stilts slowly sunk, into the sepia water.
They floated on and passed a series of crumbling, overgrown Mayan pyramids where a gangly ocelot slunk between fallen boulders. Someone fired a rifle at it from one of the boats and it darted into the jungle cover. Ethan watched as trails of dust rose from the bullet holes in the ruins.
He turned away and lay down. He did not like this ugly ocelot, the idea of fish with many heads. The feeling of communal madness he experienced at the Mormon mission had not abated. All the boats were headed the same way, upriver, toward the sea. It was as if they were all fleeing a certain pestilence. There was madness in the heart of the country, and it was not that he could not make any right choices, but that here there were no right choices to be made. Mosquitoes bit at his ankles; he should put on shoes. Dengue was always a fear, and on this river there was probably no shortage of malaria. Like everything else, the idea of malaria made him angry. He felt the anger winding in him, curling and curling—a spring waiting to be sprung. Unbidden, he saw Samantha in her pale, locked room. He had fled one madness for another. Look at this place, he thought. This was the problem with paradise. It was too extreme. Too textured and scented and rich with all the world’s sweetnesses. Like a pantry of rotten fruit, when things that sweet go bad, they do it with gusto. He slapped at a mosquito and wiped some riversmell from his nose. There were men pursuing them on the river; he had agreed to an impossible responsibility. There was no more rum. This kind of thinking would not do. It was the fever talking, that was all.
He gestured out at the heat-seared world around them.
“This is the fever talking,” he said.
AS THEY NEARED THE COAST, the jungle changed from rainforest to tropical grove and the new landscape withered in a display of blight. The brown, sickened forest curled about the high river banks where fish bones and dead lizards, tin cans and nacho bags lay scattered before the slopping water. They passed the ribcage of a mule, an overturned boat, and a Pepsi-Cola sign. The smoke from scrub fires rose from the dry interior. In the middle distance, day falling away and evening coming on, they could hear the buzz of Roycetown, the last port between the mainland and the Caribbean Sea. Everywhere chattering green birds overflew the river in hectic, formationless cha
os. Unreadable portents or portents of winnowing possibility, void. A weird dog, hairless with mange, howled from the near shore.
“The fuck is that?” Doyle said.
“Cerberus,” Ethan said. “Welcoming us home.”
THEY DOCKED AT ONE of the many makeshift marinas and went on into Roycetown. Originally settled by the Garifuna from St. Vincent, in the early nineteenth century the town fell to British pirates who, after finding that engaging in trade was more profitable than disrupting it, established Roycetown as a merchant port, from where they traded Copalan sugarcane with the pirate ports in British Honduras to the north. For some time the town flourished as a halfway point between the northern lumber and southern cane routes, though after Copalan independence many of the former pirates moved to British Honduras where, while they paid only nominal taxes, they could still fly the King’s flag, insult the Spanish, and carry on speaking their own English.
What was left reverted over the centuries into some mean approximation of its colonial past. There were no roads into town—it could only be accessed by sea or river—and Roycetown thrummed with the lunacy peculiar to tropical ports outside of law or reason. As they walked down Livingston Boulevard, the main street that ran along the banks of the Sulaco and ended, as everything ended there, at the sea, they passed rows of ornate wooden colonial pleasure-houses—once the homes of British merchants, now hotels and bordellos—that seemed, with their pastel-painted wooden doors, decorated fretwork and fancy patterned iron latticing, like overblown gingerbread houses out of a madhouse bakery. Beyond them there lay several blocks of rectangular cement cantinas and scuba shops and rundown discos. Afro-Caribbean men and women played punta and reggae on portable radios and sat in folding chairs on the street corners. The bars were filled with white expatriates.
“What’s the plan?” Ethan asked.
They were still not far from the marina, only a hundred yards or so. Livingston Boulevard opened before them and stretched away in harlequin coloring for several blocks toward the sea.
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