The Ends of the Earth

by Lucius Shepard

  “I won’t,” he say. But I think she never hear him, ’cause as he speak, blood come gushin’ from her mouth and she sag and look to be gazin’ into nowhere.

  Lee don’t hardly say nothin’ for a long time, and then it’s only after the storm have passed and he concerned with makin’ a grave. We put her down near the verge of the old city, and once she under the earth, Lee ask me to say a little somethin’ over her. So I utter up a prayer. It were strange tryin’ to talk to God with the ruined tower of the cathedral loomin’ above, all ivied and crumblin’, like a sign no prayers would be answered.

  “What you gonna do?” I ask Lee as he saddlin’ up.

  He shake his head and tighten the cinch. “What would you do, Fred?”

  “I guess I wouldn’t want to be messin’ with them fruit company boys,” I say. “They takes things more serious than I likes.”

  “Ain’t that the truth,” he say. He look over to me, and it seem all the hollows in his face has deepened. “But maybe I ain’t been takin’ things serious enough.” He worry his lip. “You really think she from the future?” He ask this like he wantin’ to have me say No.

  “I think she from somewhere damn strange,” I say. “The future sound ’bout as good as anything.”

  He scuff the ground with his heel. “Pretty woman,” he say. “I guess it ain’t reasonable she just throw her life away for nothin’.”

  I reckoned he were right.

  “Jesus Christ!” He smack his saddle. “I wish I could just forget alla ’bout her.”

  “Well, maybe you can,” I tell him. “A man can forget ’bout most anything with enough time.”

  I never should have say that, ’cause it provide Lee with somethin’ to act contrary to, with a reason to show off his pride, and it could be that little thing I say have tipped the scales of his judgment.

  “Maybe you can forget it,” he say testily. “But not me. I ain’t ’bout to forget I give her my word.” He swing hisself up into the saddle and set his horse prancin’ with a jerk of the reins. Then he grin. “Goddamn it, Fred! Let’s go! If we gotta win the world for ol’ United Fruit, we better get us a move on!”

  And with that, we ride up from the valley and into the wild and away from Aymara’s grave, and far as I know, Lee never did take a backward glance from that day forth, so busy he were with his work of forgin’ the future.

  I asked questions, attempting to clarify certain points, the exact date of the encounter among other things, but of course I did not believe Welcomes. Despite his aura of folksy integrity, I knew that Guanoja was rife with storytellers, men who would stretch the truth to any dimension for a price, and I assumed Welcomes to be one of these. Yet I was intrigued by what I perceived as the pathos surrounding the story’s invention. Here was the citizen of a country long oppressed by the economic policies of the United States, who—in order to earn a tip from an American tourist (I had given him twenty lempira upon the conclusion of his tale)—had created a fable that exonerated the United States from guilt and laid the blame for much of Central America’s brutal history upon the shoulders of a mystical woman from the future. On returning to my hotel, I typed up sections of the story and seeded them throughout a longer piece that documented various of Christmas’s crimes along with others committed by his successors. I entitled the piece “Aymara,” and the following day I sent it off to Mother Jones, having no real expectations that it would see print.

  But “Aymara” was published, as was my next piece, and the next…And so began a journalistic career that has lasted these sixteen years.

  During those years, my espousal of left-wing causes and the ensuing notoriety inspired my family to break off all connections with me. (They preferred not to acknowledge that I also lent my support to populist rebellions against Soviet-sponsored regimes.) I was not offended by their action; in fact, I took it for a confirmation of the rightness of my course, since—with their stock portfolios and mausoleumlike homes and born-again conservatism—they were as nasty a pack of capitalist rats as one could meet. I traveled to Argentina, South Africa, the Philippines, to any country that offered the scenario of a superpower-backed dictatorship and masses of the oppressed, and I wired back stories that sought to undermine the Commie-hating mentality engendered by the Reagan years. I admit that my zeal was occasionally misplaced, that I was used at times by corrupt men who passed themselves off as populist leaders. And I will further admit that in some cases I was motivated less by passionate concern than by a desire to increase my own legend. I had, you see, become a media figure. My photograph was featured on the covers of national magazines concomitant with such headings as “William Corson and the New Journalism”; my books made the best-seller lists; talk shows pestered my agent. But despite the glitter, I truly cared about the causes I espoused. Perhaps I cared too much. Perhaps—like Lee Christmas—I made the mistaken assumption that my American citizenship was a guarantee of wisdom superior to that of the peoples whom I tried to help. In retrospect, I can see that the impulses that provoked my writing of “Aymara” were no less ingenuous, no more informed, than those that inspired his career; but this is an irony I do not choose to dwell upon.

  In January of 1994, I returned to Guanoja. The purpose of the trip was partly for a vacation, my first in many years, and also to satisfy a nostalgic whim to visit the place where my career had begun. The years had brought little change to Meachem’s Landing. True, there was now a jetport outside of town, and a few of the shanty bars had been replaced by more pricey watering holes of concrete block; but it remained essentially the same confluence of dirt streets lined with weathered shacks and populated by raggedly dressed blacks. The most salient differences were the gaggle of lower-echelon Honduran civil servants who spent each day hunched over their typewriters on the second-story verandah of the Hotel Captain Henry, churning out reams of officialese, and the alarming number of CIA agents: cold-eyed, patently anonymous men who could be seen sitting in the bars, gazing moodily toward Nicaragua and the Red Menace. Despite the Chamorro presidency, the Sandinistas had once again begun to make expansionist noises. War was in the offing, its onset as inevitable as the approach of a season, and this, too, was a factor in my choice of a vacation spot. I had received word of a mysterious military installation on the Honduran mainland, and—after having nosed around Washington for several weeks—I had been invited to inspect this installation. The Pentagon apparently wanted to assure me of its harmlessness and thus prevent their benign policies from being besmirched by more of my yellow journalism.

  After checking into the hotel, I walked out past the town to the weedy little graveyard, where I expected I would find a stone marking the remains of Fred Welcomes. There was, indeed, such a stone, and I was startled to learn that he had survived until 1990, dying at the age of 106. I had assumed that he could not have lived much past the date of my interview with him, and the fact that he had roused my guilt. All my good fortune was founded upon his eloquent he, and I could have done a great deal to ease his decline. I leaned against the rusted fence, thinking that I was no better than the businessmen whose exploitative practices I had long decried, that I had mined gold from the old man’s imagination and given him a pittance in return. I was made so morose that later the same night, unable to achieve peace of mind, I set out on a drunk…at least this was my intent.

  Across the street from the hotel was a two-story building of white stucco with faded lettering above the door that read MAUD PRICE’S GOLDEN DREAM. I remembered Maud from my previous trip—a fat, black woman who had kept an enormous turtle in a tin washtub and would entertain herself by feeding it chicken necks and watching it eat—and I was saddened to discover that she, too, had passed away. Her daughter was now the proprietor, and I was pleased to find that she had maintained Maud’s inimitable decor. Strung across the ceiling were dozens upon dozens of man-shaped paper dolls, colored red and black, and these cast magical-looking shadows on the walls by the light of two flickering lanterns. Six woode
n tables, a bar atop which rested a venerable stereo that was grinding out listless reggae, and a number of framed photographs whose glass was too flyspecked to permit easy observation of the subject matter. I ordered a beer, a Salvavidas, and was preparing for a bout of drunken self-abnegation when I noticed a young woman staring at me from the rear table. On meeting my eyes, she showed no sign of embarrassment and held her gaze steady for a long moment before turning back to the magazine she had been reading. Even in that dim light, I could see she was beautiful. Slim, long-limbed, with a honeyed complexion. Curls of black hair hung over the front of her white blouse, their shapes as elegant as the tail feathers of exotic birds. Her face…I could tell you that she had large dark eyes and high cheekbones, that her features had an impassive Indian cast. But that does nothing more than to define her by type and illuminates her not at all. This was a woman with whom I was soon to be in love, if I was not somewhat in love with her already, and the most difficult thing in the world to describe is the face of your lover, because though it is familiar in every detail, it tends to become a mirror of your devotion, to reflect the ideals of passion, and thus is less a human face than the face of love itself.

  I continued to watch her, and after a while she looked up again and smiled. There was no way I could ignore this contact. I walked over, introduced myself (in Spanish, which I assumed to be her native tongue), and asked if I could join her. “Why not?” she replied in English, and after I had taken a seat, she pushed her magazine toward me, pointing to an inset photograph of me, one snapped some years before when I had worn a mustache. “I thought it was you,” she said. “You look much more handsome clean-shaven.”

  Her name, she told me, was Ivie Solis. She was employed by a travel agency in La Ceiba and was on a working vacation, having arrived the day before. We talked of this and that, nothing of consequence, but the air between us seemed to crackle. Everything about her, everything she did, struck a chord within me, and I was mesmerized by her movements, entranced, as if she were a magician who might at any moment loose a flight of birds from her fingertips.

  Eventually the conversation turned to my work, of which she had read the lion’s share, and she told me that her favorite piece was my first, “Aymara.” I expressed surprise that she had seen it—it had never been reprinted—and she explained that her parents had run a small hotel catering to American tourists, and the magazine had been left in one of the rooms. “It had the feel of being part of a puzzle,” she said. “Or the answer to a riddle.”

  “It seems fairly straightforward to me,” I said.

  She tucked a curl behind her ear, a gesture I was coming to recognize as characteristic. “That’s because you didn’t believe the old man’s story.”

  “And you did?”

  “I didn’t leap to disbelief as you did.” She settled back in her chair, picking at the label of her beer bottle. “I guess I just like thinking about what motivated the woman.”

  “Obviously,” I said, “according to the logic of the story, she came from a world worse off than this one and was hoping to initiate a course of events that would improve it.”

  “I thought that myself at first,” she said. “But it doesn’t fit the logic of the story. Don’t you remember? She knew what would happen to Christmas. His military career, his triumphs. If she’d come from a world in which those things hadn’t occurred, she wouldn’t have had knowledge of them.”

  “So…” I began.

  “I think,” she cut in, “that if she did exist, she came from this world. That she knew she would have to sacrifice herself in order to ensure that Christmas did as he did. It may be that your article was the agency that informed her of her duty.”

  “Even if that’s the case,” I said, “why would she have tried to inspire Christmas’s crimes? Why wouldn’t she have tried to make him effect good works? Perhaps she could have destroyed United Fruit.”

  “That would be the last thing she’d want. Don’t you see? If her actions were politically motivated, she would understand that before real change could occur, the circumstances, the conditions of life under American rule, would have to be so oppressive that violent change would become a viable option. Revolution. She’d realize that Christmas’s violences were necessary. They set the tone for American policies and licensed subsequent violence. She’d be afraid that if Christmas didn’t work for United Fruit, the process of history that set the stage for revolution might be slowed down or negated. Perhaps the American stranglehold might be achieved with such subtlety that change would be forever impossible.”

  She spoke these words with marked intensity, and I believe I realized then that there was more to Ivie than met the eye. Her logic was the logic of terrorism, the justification of bloodshed in terms of its consciousness-raising effects. But I was so intent upon her as a woman, I scarcely noticed the implication of what she had said.

  “Well,” I said, “given that your scenario is accurate, it still doesn’t make sense. The idea of time travel, of tinkering with the past…it’s absurd. Too many paradoxes are involved. What you’re supposing isn’t a chain of events wherein one action predicates another. It’s a loop, a metaphysical knot tied in reality, linking my article and some woman and a man years dead. There’s no end, no beginning. Things don’t work that way.”

  “They don’t?” She lowered her eyes and traced a design in the moisture on the table. “It seems to me that life is paradox. Things occur without apparent reason between nations.” She looked up at me. “Between people. Perhaps there are reasons, but they’re impossible to unravel or define. And dealing with such an unreasonable quantity as time, I wouldn’t expect it to be anything other than paradoxical.”

  We moved on to other topics, and shortly afterward we left the bar and walked along the road to Flowers Bay. A few hundred yards past the last shanty, at a point where the road meandered close to the shore and the sea lay calm beneath a sheen of starlight, visible through a labyrinthine fringe of mangrove, there I kissed her. It was the kind of kiss that holds a lifetime of promise, tentative, then growing more assured and involving as the contact surpasses all your expectations. I had thought kisses like that existed solely in the province of romance novels, and on discovering this was not so, all my cynicism was dissolved and I fell wholly in love with Ivie Solis.

  I do not propose to detail our affair, the evolution of our feelings. While these things seemed to me remarkable, I doubt they were more so than the interactions of any other pair of lovers, and they are pertinent to my story only in the volatility that attached to our moments together. Despite Ivie’s thesis that love—like time—was an inexplicable mystery, I sought to explain it to myself and decided that because I had never had any slack in my life, because I had never allowed myself the luxury of deep emotional involvement, I had therefore been ripe for the picking. I might, I told myself, have fallen in love with anyone. Ivie had simply been the first acceptable candidate to happen along. All I knew of her aside from her work and place of birth was a few bits and pieces: that she was twenty-six; that she had attended the University of Miami; that—like most Hondurans—she resented the American presence in her country; that she had a passion for coconut candy and enjoyed the works of Manuel Puig. How, I wondered, could I be obsessed with someone about whose background I was almost completely ignorant. And yet perhaps my depth of feeling was enhanced by this lack of real knowledge. Things are often most alluring when they are not quite real, when your contact with them is brief and intense, and in the light of the mind they acquire the vivid artfulness of a dream.

  We spent nearly every moment of every day in each other’s company, and most of this in making love. My room, our clothing, smelled of sex, and we became such a joke to the old woman who cleaned the hotel that whenever she saw us she would let loose with gales of laughter. The only times we were apart were an hour or so each afternoon when Ivie would have to perform her function as a travel agent, securing—she said—cheap group rates from various resort
s that would be offered by her firm to American skin divers. On most of these occasions I would pace back and forth, impatient for her return. But then, ten days after we had initiated the affair, thinking I might as well make some use of the interval, I rented a car and drove to Spanish Harbor, a small town up the coast where there had lately been several outbreaks of racial violence, highly untypical for Guanoja; I was interested in determining whether or not these incidents were related to the martial atmosphere that had been gathering about the island.

  By the time I arrived in the town, which differed from Meachem’s Landing hardly at all, having a larger harbor and perhaps a half a dozen more streets, I was thirsty, and I stopped in a tourist restaurant for a beer. This particular restaurant, The Treasure Chest, consisted of a small room done up in pirate decor that was fronted by a concrete deck where patrons sat beneath striped umbrellas. Standing at the bar, I had a clear view of the deck, and as I sipped my beer, wondering how best to pursue my subject, I spotted Ivie sitting at a table near the railing. With her was a man wearing a gray business suit. I assumed him to be a resort owner, but when he turned to signal a waiter, I recognized him by his hawkish features and fringe of salt-and-pepper beard to be Abimael Sotomayor, the leader of Sangre y Verdad (Blood and Truth), one of the most extreme of Latin American terrorist groups. I had twice interviewed him and I knew him for a charismatic and scary man, a poet who excelled at torture, whose followers performed quasi-mystical blood rituals in his name prior to each engagement. The sight of him with Ivie numbed me, and I began to construct rationalizations that would explain her presence in innocent terms. But none of my rationalizations held water.