There were all sorts of faults in his logic but Ethan was certain that it was not his place or in his interest to mention them. He felt that he had staggered into someone else’s malarial dream. He stood and Cunningham let him.
“Whatever you think about me is wrong,” he said. “I’m just escorting the girl to her sister.”
“Look,” Cunningham said. “Maybe you’re carrying a torch for this girl? Maybe you want to fuck her a little bit? Hey, that’s no problem here. Nobody cares. That’s Anglo life in the Central American Carib, partner. Get on with it.”
“We’re going to Tlaxcultepec,” Ethan said. “We’re meeting her at the Hotel Guadelupe. Is that what you want?”
Ethan felt his weight shifting unsteadily from foot to foot, his hand shaking against the barstool. Hopefully, by the time they passed through the capital on their way to the States, Cunningham would be gone, or thrown off the trail, staking out an empty hotel for a woman who wouldn’t show. The lies seemed good enough, supposing that Cunningham couldn’t spot a lie. Tlax would make sense and so would the Guadelupe. It was Doyle’s favorite hotel in the capital, the one they’d always stayed at while traveling, which meant it was cheap and seedy and in a bad part of town. Glue junkies prowled the entrance for travelers they could bum or steal a few pesos off of. From the roof deck you could watch the lights fail with regularity in the city. You could sometimes see the flash of gunfire. Cunningham would dig it.
“I’m leaving now,” Ethan said. “Do you know anything about this man following me? Soto?”
Cunningham whistled through his teeth.
“We all have the same agenda, just different employers. He’s with the generals. El Lobo and the boys with epaulets.”
Cunningham peered into his empty glass and frowned.
“He’s a moral spasm, not a man. Be glad that I found you first,” Cunningham said. “I’m much more genteel. I can occasionally forgive a fellow his flaws.”
He mopped his brow with his linen sleeve that was yellowed from similar wipings. So no one was immune to that, here.
“You know, if you wanted I could take her off your hands, the girl. Save you the trouble of meeting Soto.”
It was all too tempting to imagine. He could be gone, he could leave with Doyle. It’s not like he was without cause. He had been lied to; he had no interest in aiding guerrillas or FARC or anyone else. Of course there was still a chance, however slim, that Yolanda had saved his life, and Mirabelle was clearly incapable of guile. In the end one must be able to explain one’s actions to oneself.
Ethan turned away and walked to the door, the night’s final watches beyond it.
“No worries, partner,” Cunningham said. “I’ll get the tab.”
Ethan heard him pick up the empty soup bowl, drop it on the bar.
“I wouldn’t have eaten that,” he called. “Have you seen those fish? Get ready for some weird dreams tonight.”
ETHAN STUMBLED AS HE WALKED down the boulevard to his hotel. He was going too quickly. A man doesn’t run in the tropics unless he’s being chased, and he didn’t need to draw attention to himself. It was late. The freaky bird cries that attended the first hours before dawn were just commencing in the jungle. Music still rose from the boat decks, but the bars were mostly quiet. What patrons Ethan saw as he walked sat slumped over their tables, alone or in small, melancholy groups. Three times he passed drunk Indians singing Bon Jovi karaoke to empty bars. At least it wasn’t the Eagles. The coasts, they always said, were different.
He slowed as he neared his hotel and scanned the street. The hotel was a white Victorian river house with two levels of covered, wraparound porches. Electric lanterns hung between the gables and the light swayed and cast long shadows in the warm wind. Here the street was empty, and from where he was standing the low, vine-tangled power lines latticed the heavy blue sky. He looked behind him toward the sound of music but in the night he could not see the river.
The lights were off in the lobby and he climbed the stairs in the hot, pine-smelling dark. They would have to be up to catch the ferry by first light. That would leave two hours of sleep, maybe fewer, and now, after days without, there was nothing in the world for him but sleep. A cat shied from his feet as he made the landing. He went down the hall in the dark to his door.
THINGS WERE NOT GOING WELL in the room. Mirabelle lay half out of the bed and tangled in her sheets like something that had died as it broke through the shell of its chrysalis. The air smelled of sweat and bile and maybe even faintly of feces. Next door, in the room that they were supposed to have left empty, the dummy room, Doyle was clearly entertaining the woman from the bar. She laughed hysterically.
“You’re crazy,” Ethan heard her call. “Tu loco, baby.”
He banged on the wall and opened the window. Outside, there was still no glow of dawn but the grackles called and called in the ceiba trees. He saw a flock of them flush at some noise, black and swarming against the sky. At a distance they seemed small, insect-like, somehow ominous. He breathed deeply of the open air, the river gas and fry oil and sea salt. It was much better than the room.
“Why is it so cold in here,” Mirabelle mumbled from the bed.
“It’s not cold,” Ethan said. “I opened a window.”
She tried to pull herself back into the bed.
“I feel very cold,” she said.
Ethan turned from the window to look at her, but glanced away quickly.
“We need some fresh air,” he said. “Are you sick?”
“Maybe that’s what She means,” Mirabelle said. “She thinks I’m ill.”
Ethan waited a moment. Somewhere far off a light flashed on the water.
“The Virgin Mary?” he said. “She tells you that you’re sick?”
“Maybe,” Mirabelle said. “It’s hard to say what She means.”
ETHAN BANGED ON THE DOOR of the dummy room. He heard them suddenly go quiet and start whispering. A pointless precaution.
“Doyle, it’s me. Open the door.”
The woman was buttoning her shirt by the window. She smiled and waved and her shirt fell open. Doyle was wearing a sailor’s cap and Ethan’s sunglasses.
“Ethan, you’ve caught me in medias res.”
The woman had turned away to put up her hair. She checked her makeup in the window glass.
“You shouldn’t have the light on,” Ethan said. “You shouldn’t be in here at all.”
“Fine,” Doyle said. He flipped the switch and the woman sat down on the bed. Outside, the light flashed again on the water. Doyle took off Ethan’s sunglasses and handed them back to him.
“It’s best not to ask,” he said.
By first light on the water Ethan nodded in and out of sleep as the ferry bounced and rocked toward Santa Maria. Gulls rose from the waves, wheeled overhead.
They had checked out of the hotel just before dawn and made their way down to the ferry launch.
“Just bang on the door of the boathouse,” the hotel proprietor had told them. “Bang and don’t stop banging until Roberto answers. He be asleep or drunk, him. Or maybe he be both. Either way he take you where you want to go.”
Roberto was drunk, but not yet asleep. His gray hair was pulled into a stringy ponytail. He wore khaki boat shorts and nothing else. His prodigious belly hung heavily over his belt like some enormous, overripe fruit sagging from the bough. He stood at the boathouse door, rubbed his red eyes, and stared hard at the three of them. The sun had not yet risen over the water.
“Is it night yet?” he asked.
“No,” Doyle said. “It’s morning, man. It’s a new day.”
“Okay, good,” the captain said. “Because I do not ferry at night.”
MORNING CAME on the Caribbean. Gulls broke from the water. The sun rose quickly—it crested the far gray horizon and then it was overhead—with the sea opening in layers of aqueous shades to its light: aqua to periwinkle to azure, all lined, intermittently, with the purple shadow of risen reefs wher
e the sea caught and foamed.
And then they were past all that as the ocean floor dropped out to the empty depths of the sea, where the pretty sun-sluiced green and light blues gave way to the deep-dark of the open water, a sky at dusk, the impossible fathoms of vanishing light.
In the far distance islands rose, lush and hazy, from the sea. Ethan closed his eyes and let the boat rock him back into shallow sleep. A tilting, rocking sleep. The sleep of doldrums, horse latitudes. When he opened them again the islands were gone. There was just the sound of the engine and the water spreading out before him.
In his dream there is a scorpion in the boat. It scrabbles about in the dirty bilge water.
“That’s Soto,” Mirabelle says. “He’s going to take me with him.”
Ethan looks about, but Doyle and Roberto are gone. It’s just the three of them in the boat. The rank-smelling sea all around.
“He found us pretty quickly,” he says.
“No,” Mirabelle answers. “He was here the whole time.”
Ethan looks down and his feet are bare. He cannot step on the scorpion in bare feet. It skitters about in the bilge water. Mirabelle starts to cry.
WHEN HE WOKE, Mirabelle was in the downstairs cabin shitting noisily.
“The girl’s sick,” Doyle said. “Like big-time.”
Ethan rubbed his eyes and put on his sunglasses. A cormorant followed them overhead. The sounds from the galley were not diminishing. As in his dream, she had begun to cry.
“Goddamn,” he said.
The cormorant was gone. Another string of islands wavered in the distant haze.
“How much farther?” he asked Roberto.
“Thirty minutes,” the captain said. “If that girl doesn’t keep adding weight to my bow.”
Roberto laughed and swigged from a bottle of clear Nicaraguan rum. He offered it to Ethan and somehow Ethan declined. He had not told Doyle about Cunningham yet and he didn’t want to. The conversation would not go well. Doyle, again, had been right. Doyle who killed police officers and opened bars and slept with every woman who passed his way—Doyle who seemed the poster boy for bad decisions—was right again, as always. If he’s as bad as I think he is, thought Ethan, then I must be worse.
The water lightened. They were nearing the island shallows where it was cooler. Flocks of birds cast shadows over the cabin and there were other boats tugging their way between the fishing reefs. Mirabelle did not sound any better. He wondered if Cunningham had known that he was lying, if he was out there behind them somewhere, or if Soto was—one of the boats in the distance, gaining on them.
Cunningham bothered Ethan in that he demanded a moral perspective and Ethan had always tried to avoid such arguments about Copal. With its total lack of balance or subtlety, Copal undermined the intricacies of moral reasoning. One could make any argument and not be wrong. One could support any position—righteous or pragmatic—but every perspective was ultimately rendered null by the acuteness of poverty, climate, and despair. One saw terrible things: children sleeping in rusted-out ovens, beggars without arms wailing by the side of the road, sixteen-year-old girls sleeping with foreign contractors for bean money. There seemed a palpable lack of nuance.
Cunningham was right: the guerrillas were no good. Since there was no longer any Soviet funding, they relied on the drug trade and robbery and kidnappings to finance a movement increasingly devoid of ideology. Copal was not El Salvador. The guerrillas had no interest in hanging up their bandoliers and joining the government. Besides, there was no government for them to join. But Cunningham had been wrong about Ethan. FARC? Guerrillas? He had no stake in those things. If forced to have an opinion, he’d come out against them every time. But he’d also come out against El Lobo, his military cronies and their psychotic death squads. He’d come out against the gangs and the cartels and the people who seemed content to let them hack the country into despair. He’d come out against the corrupt domination of the poor by the vastly wealthy, the corporations that undermined any attempts to establish a middle class, the U.S. fruit companies and Japanese mining firms and local sugar plantations that lined El Lobo’s coffers. Here, Ethan would come out against everything. It was like Doyle said at Tireisias’s cabin: things are what they are, or they’re worse. Ethan knew that this kind of moral relativism was useless, cowardly even. He had to make a choice about Mirabelle and to do so was also to take a stand.
Below decks the crazy girl wept with shame. The waters before them opened into tranquil aquamarine reef shallows and the west winds carried the smell of tropical earth out to the boat: tamarind and sea grapes and the wet heat of flowering jasmine.
YOLANDA’S DIRECTIONS had been perfectly clear, and they found the house easily enough. Luckily, Doyle had packed a box of electrolyte rehydration packets, and they bought two bottles of sweet Cuban rum and a case of purified water at a bodega on the dock and then followed the road through town and along the shore. The island was as Yolanda described it: pink and yellow and aqua-painted houses lined the road, fishing boats rocked in shallow moorings, children played soccer in the road and women hung laundry on the lines strung up between the coconut palms as boom boxes blared static and music into the fragrant air.
Clearly the blight that scourged the mainland had not yet reached Santa Maria. Jacaranda and Indian almond and tamarind trees canopied the street, the shore was lined with wild roses and sea grapes, untended banana groves bordered the lane leading to Yolanda’s house. Ethan cracked the first bottle of ron dulce and took a swig and passed it to Doyle. Wind out of the mountains carried the smell of cooking oil and plantains down the hill from the Spanish plaza. A flaking white picket fence overgrown with vines circled the house and the roof sagged under the damp of the tree shade. They stood before the small house as Ethan fumbled through the bag for Yolanda’s key.
“What do you think, Mirabelle?” he asked. “This is your mother’s island. Not bad, eh?”
Mirabelle’s sweaty face had accrued a pallid hue like cheese left out under lights.
“Please hurry and find the key,” she said. “I need to use the bathroom.”
UNDER THE SEA CHEST by the back window Ethan found the packet of identification papers, a passport, and—For Emergency—a phone number.
Mirabelle lay on the concrete floor in the bathroom and refused to come out.
“There’s no point,” she said. “I’ll just have to crawl back.”
Ethan left a pillow and a thermos of electrolyte water outside the door and followed Doyle outside where they sat on the stoop and drank sweet rum mixed with water and watched the tide ripple through the trees.
“We have a problem,” Ethan said.
Doyle nodded and added more rum to his water. “I think that girl has cholera.”
“Then we have two problems,” Ethan said.
He told Doyle about the night before, about Cunningham and Camillo and FARC. Doyle didn’t say anything as he spoke, but refilled his glass almost to the rim with rum, sipped it and then put it down, far away from him, far enough so that he’d really have to stretch to reach it. When he was finished speaking, Doyle stood up and went inside. Ethan heard him open a bottle of water in the kitchen and shake another electrolyte packet, heard him talking to Mirabelle through the door. When he came back outside he didn’t look at Ethan, but down and away, toward the green, metallic sea.
“This is what we need to do,” he said. “We need to make her a sickbed.”
“There’s a bed in the house,” Ethan said. “There’s two.”
Doyle started to reach for his rum but stopped. He turned and looked down the canopied lane: the children playing soccer there, the empty paths beyond them.
“Pretty soon she won’t be able to get out of bed. She’ll be too weak for that. We have to cut a hole in the bed. We’ll need a bucket. Maybe two.”
“Shouldn’t we find a doctor?”
Doyle shook his head and reached for his rum. Drank it this time.
“There’s no
thing a doctor can do now but spread fear of contamination in the village. We just have to keep her hydrated. It’ll run its course.”
The poor girl, thought Ethan. Relegated, before him, to a wasted, shitting thing. To shit into a bucket she would not have the strength to move. The shame of it. He would have to sit by her bed and mop her brow. He would have to keep her hydrated. He would open and close the windows. He felt a sudden affection for her that he didn’t wish to consider.
“Come help me make up these rehydration packets,” Doyle said.
Ethan followed him into the kitchen, where two thermoses of electrolyte water already stood on the counter. Doyle began opening packages and pouring the powder into water bottles.
“Why are we making the rest of these now?” Ethan asked.
“It’s the least we can do, don’t you think?”
Ethan knew, then, where this was going. He tried to keep his voice level. He turned to look out the window as he spoke.
“What do you mean by that, Brendan?”
“She’s going to be bedridden for days. Two or three at the very least.”
“So?”
“So this is the end of the line. You can’t move her, and by the time you can it’ll be too late.”
Ethan stepped back outside and Doyle followed him. They closed the door. The sun was high over the sea and there were no boats coming from the mainland.
“You’re saying that we just leave her?”
“What would you do, Ethan? Sit here with her and wait for Soto? You think he’s not coming? You think that maybe you outfoxed him?”
“Of course he’s coming,” Ethan said.
“So that’s it. He’ll come and he’ll kill you and it won’t mean a thing. That’s if that spook from Roycetown doesn’t get here first. Not that it matters. However you shake it, it ends the same way.”
Horse Latitudes Page 29