The Ends of the Earth

by Lucius Shepard

  I’d been friends with DeVries for—as I’ve said—four years, but our friendship went by the boards, replaced by panic, and with Sherril in tow, I kept running, busting down rocky defiles, scrambling up rises, stumbling, falling, yelling in fright at every hint of movement. We must have been in flight for about five or six minutes when after a spectacular fall, rolling halfway down a hill through decayed vegetation and ferns, I discovered the mouth of a cave.

  The limestone foundation of the Petén is riddled with caves, and so this was no miraculous occurrence; but being out of breath and bone-tired, I viewed it as such at the time. The opening, into which my legs had wound up dangling at the end of my fall, was narrow, choked with vines, no more than a couple of feet wide, but I could sense a large empty space beyond. I cleared away the vines, caught Sherril’s hand, and led her inside. Cool musty smell, water dripping somewhere near. I held up my cigarette lighter for a torch, illuminating a portion of a large domed gallery, the walls white and smooth, except for the occasional volute of limestone; against one wall was a tarpaulin with the edge of a crate showing beneath it. I clicked off the lighter, felt my way toward the tarp; when I reached it, using the lighter again, I examined the crates—there were four of them, all stamped with code designations and marked US AIR FORCE. There was the distinct odor of machine oil.

  “What are they?” Sherril asked.

  “Smells like weapons,” I said. “Automatic rifles, I hope.”

  I began working at one of the crates, prying at the boards, but I wasn’t making much headway. Then I heard a noise from outside the cave, something heavy moving in the brush. There was a large boulder beside the mouth, and in hopes that we could block the entrance with it, Sherril and I hurried back across the cave; but by the time we reached the entrance, the source of the noise was already halfway in, blocking out the faint gleam of moonlight from above. We flattened against the wall next to the opening. A shadow stepped into the cave, too big to be one of the Indians; a beam of light sprang from its hand. I made out camouflage gear, a holstered pistol, and knowing that we had no choice but to attack, I jumped the man, driving him onto his back. Sherril was right behind me, clawing at his face. The man cursed in Spanish, tried to throw me off, and he might have if Sherril hadn’t been bothering him. I managed to grab his hair; I smashed his head against the stone; after the third blow he went limp. I rolled away from him, catching my breath. Sherril picked up the flashlight and shined it on the man’s slack pitted face. It was Major Pedroza. That made sense to me—the major was likely stockpiling weapons for his own little coup, or else was making a neat profit selling to the contras or some other group of courageous freedom fighters.

  While I hadn’t had time to absorb DeVries’s death, the whole affair of the experimental farm, it seemed those things were moving me now, that and everything else I’d seen over the years, all the bad history I’d reported to no avail, and it also seems that Sherril was directed by similar motives, by anger born of disillusionment. Although she hadn’t seen as much as I, although I hadn’t given her the respect she deserved, I realized she had the instincts I’d once had for compassion, for truth, for hope. Now, in a single night, all those instincts had been fouled.

  We went about tying up Pedroza with lengths of vine that I cut from around the cave mouth, using the knife I’d taken from him. I felt stony and emotionless, as if I were wrapping a package of meat. I turned him onto his belly and tied his arms behind him; then I tied his legs and connected them to a noose that fitted tightly around his neck. If he struggled, he would only succeed in strangling himself. I was sure of one thing—no matter what happened to me and Sherril, Pedroza was going to die. This may strike some as unfair. What certain knowledge, they may ask, did I have about him? He certainly had done nothing to me. But as I have detailed earlier, he was no innocent. In truth, it should have been Shellgrave whom I was preparing to kill; he was the true villain of the piece, or at least the emblem of true villainy. Pedrozas would be impossible without Shellgraves. But the major would do, he would satisfy. I tore my shirt to make a gag and stuffed it into his mouth, lashing it in place with my belt. This accomplished, Sherril and I pushed the boulder to seal off the entrance; then we sat down to wait.

  Neither of us said much. I was busy dealing with my desertion of DeVries; I knew I could have done nothing for him, but knowing that was little help. I saw him in my mind’s eye firing Shellgrave’s gun, a glimpse of blond hair, a pale strained face, then I saw him swarmed by the Indians, and then I heard him scream. I should have been used to that sort of quick exit; I’d had it happen many times before, but this one wasn’t going down easily. Maybe I’d been closer to DeVries than I had realized, or maybe it was the nightmare surrounding his death that made it seem insurmountable.

  I’m not sure what was running through Sherril’s mind, but I felt that the currents of our thoughts were somehow parallel. She began to shiver—it was dank in that cave—and I put an arm around her, let her lean against me. I asked her if she was okay, and she said, “Yeah,” and snuggled up close. Her clean girl smell made me wistful and weak. Soon after that I kissed her. She pulled away at first, and said, “No, don’t…not now.”

  “All right,” I said evenly; in my mind I was ready to go along with her, but I kept my hand on her breast.

  “What are you doing?” she said.

  “I don’t know, I just needed to touch you.”

  I took my hand away, but after a moment she put it back, held it against her breast. She made a despairing noise.

  “I guess I need it, too,” she said. “Isn’t that something?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “To want this now. Isn’t that”—she gave a dismayed laugh—“wrong or something.” Another laugh. “Wrong.” She said the word as if it had gained a whole new meaning, one she was only now capable of understanding.

  I had no answers for her. I kissed her again, and this time she kissed back; not long after that we spread our clothing on the stone for a mattress and made love. It was the only hope we had, the only thing we could do to save ourselves from the blind shadows and bloody shouts thronging our heads, and as a result our lovemaking was rough, more an act of anger than one of compassion. Involved in it, too, was the mutuality we’d had to begin with, the thing that might have grown to health, but now—I thought—fed by the food of that grotesque night, would bloom twisted, dark, and futureless. And yet by engaging that mutuality, I had the sense that I was committing to it in a way from which it would be impossible to pull back.

  It must have been while we were making love that the Indians found us, because when I surfaced from the heat and confusion that we had generated, I heard their voices: odd fluted whispers issuing not from the cave mouth but from somewhere overhead, leading me to realize there must be a second entrance. We struggled into our clothes, and I broke into the crates with Pedroza’s knife; I had his pistol, but I doubted that would be sufficient firepower. The first crate contained antipersonnel rockets; I had no idea of how to use them. The second, however, contained M-16s and full clips. I inserted a clip into one and made ready to defend. I was surprised that they hadn’t already attacked us, and when after several minutes they still hadn’t made a move, I shined Pedroza’s flashlight toward the ceiling.

  In the instant before they ducked away from the second entrance, which was halfway up the side of the dome, I saw the glowing yellow cores of their eyes; the sight was so alarming, I nearly dropped the flashlight. I handed it to Sherril and fired a short burst at the opening; it wasn’t very big, a mere crack, but it might, I thought, be large enough to admit those twisted bodies. The drop was about forty feet.

  “The papers,” I asked Sherril, “did they say anything about whether they’d be able to take a long fall?”

  She thought it over. “There was some stuff about low calcium content. Their bones are probably pretty brittle.”

  “They might think of lowering vines.”

  “Maybe, but a
ccording to the papers they’re…they’re animals. Their IQs aren’t measurable.”

  I heard a strangled noise and had Sherril shine the flashlight toward Pedroza; his eyes were bugged, his face suffused with blood.

  “Be careful,” I advised him in Spanish. “You’ll hurt yourself.”

  His eyes looked more baleful than those of the Indians.

  “I think we’ll be all right,” Sherril said. “If we can hold them off till morning, we’ll be all right.”

  “Because they’re nocturnals?”

  “Uh-huh. They can’t take much light. They might be able to wait until midmorning, what with the canopy, but by noon they’d be in terrible pain.” The flashlight wavered in her hand. “They burrow.”

  “What?” I said.

  “They move around at night, and when daylight comes, wherever they are, they dig burrows in the dirt, they cover themselves with dirt and sleep…like vampires. They scarcely breathe at all when they’re asleep.”

  “Christ,” I said, unable to absorb this, to feel any more revulsion than was already within me.

  I glanced at Pedroza; he had a lot to answer for.

  Sherril was looking at him, too, and from the loathing that registered in her expression, I knew that Pedroza would be in for a bad time even if I weren’t there.

  We sat down by the boulder, keeping our weight against it in case the Indians tried to move it; we kept the light shining on the entrance overhead, and we talked to drown out the incessant and unsettling fluting of their voices, not speech in all likelihood, mere noises, the music of a pitiless folly reverberating through the cave. I told Sherril stories, but they weren’t the stories I would have told her under other circumstances. They were stories about the brave good things I’d seen, stories that still hoped, stories that gave storytelling a good name, and not my usual rotten-with-disgust tales of Businessmen From Hell and their global sleights-of-hand. Those stories were the best parts of my life passing before my eyes, and it wasn’t that I was afraid of dying, because I thought we were going to make it; it was that the last of my foolish ideals were giving up the ghost, having their final say before wisping up into ectoplasmic nada. Although I’d convinced myself that I’d given up on my ideals a long time before, I believe it was then that I utterly surrendered to the evil of the world.

  It was the same for Sherril. She talked about nursing, about the good feeling it gave her, she talked about her home, her old friends, but she kept lapsing. I would have to tune her in with questions as if her station were fading from the dial. I watched her face. She was more than pretty, so damn pretty I couldn’t believe that I’d had the fortune to make love to her—a stupid thing to consider, but stupid thoughts like that were occurring constantly. Her eyes were green with hazel flecks in the irises, her hair was silky, but her most attractive feature was that she knew what I knew. She was changing before my eyes, toughening, learning things that she shouldn’t have had to learn all at once; she was a nice girl, and it was a shame for her to have to understand so young what a shuck niceness was. All the while as I listened, I could hear the sick music of the doomed tribe wanting to kill us, Pedroza grunting as he tried to enlist our attention. None of that mattered. In a way, I was almost happy to be up against it, to know how bad it could get, and yet there I was, still able to look at a pretty woman and hope for something. I was aware that even this could be taken from me, but I was beyond being afraid. And I was learning, too. Although I didn’t recognize it at the time, I was learning that you can fall in love through hate, by being with someone in a crucible of a moment when everything else is dying and the only thing left is to try to live. Or maybe it wasn’t love, maybe it was just the thing that takes the place of love for those who have surrendered.

  Just before dawn, some of the Indians began dropping through the crack. About twenty of them in all made the jump, but no more than a third of that number survived the landing, and they were incapable of swift movement, their bones shattered. The first one down startled me and drew a shriek from Sherril; but after that it wasn’t even dramatic, merely pitiful. The wounded ones crawled toward us, their razor-slit mouths agape to reveal blood-red tongues within, their strangely unfinished faces displaying what struck me as a parody of desperation. I finished them off with bursts from the M-16. I didn’t know what had caused them to try, nor did I know why they had stopped, why they didn’t just keep coming like lemmings; perhaps both the jumping and the stopping had been stages along the path to their own surrender. When I was sure that no more would be coming, I dragged their bodies deeper into the cave, out of sight around a bend; I tried to avoid looking at them, but I couldn’t help noticing a few details. Shriveled genitalia; a faint bluish cast to the skin as if they suffered from cyanosis; the S-curved spines, the knotted shoulder blades. They were light, those bodies, like the bodies of hollow children.

  The sun rose about a quarter of six that morning, making a dim red glow in the crack overhead, a slit evil eye, but the voices kept fluting for a while after that. Pedroza’s eyes pleaded with us; he had wet his pants, the poor soul. We watched him wriggle and grunt; we made it a game to see which of us could get him to produce the most interesting noise by doing things such as picking up the knife and walking behind him.

  Eventually we let him alone and sat talking, planning what we’d do once we left the cave: avoid Sayaxché, strike out for Flores, maybe hitch a ride with an oil truck returning from the jungle.

  Sherril looked at me and said, “What are you going to do afterward?”

  “I’m not staying around here. The States…maybe I’ll go back to the States. How ’bout you? Nicaragua?”

  She shook her head. “I can’t think of anywhere that sounds right. Maybe home.”

  “Calgary.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “What’s Calgary like?”

  She opened her mouth, closed it, then laughed. “I don’t know.” Then after a pause. “The Rockies, they’re close by.”

  I thought about the Rockies, about their clean, cold rectitude, their piney stillness, so different from the malarial tumult I had traveled in for all those years. I said their name out loud; Sherril glanced at me inquiringly.

  “Just seeing if it sounded right,” I said.

  It was almost noon before we decided it was absolutely safe to leave the cave. I went over to Pedroza and unplugged his mouth. He had to lick his lips and work his jaw for a few moments in order to speak; then he said, “Please…I…please.”

  “Please what?” I asked him.

  His eyes darted to Sherril, back to me.

  “Don’t shoot me,” he said. “I have money, I can help you.”

  “I’m not going to shoot you,” I said. “I’m going to leave you tied up here.”

  That was a test to see his reaction, to determine whether he had any allies left alive; if he flunked I intended to shoot him. His fear was no act, he was terrified. He babbled, promising everything, he swore to help us. I hated him so much, I cannot tell you how much I hated him. He was all the objects of my hate.

  “I could shoot you,” I said. “But I think I’ll just leave you here. Of course you’ve got an option. I bet if you jerk real hard with your legs, you can probably kill yourself.”

  “Listen,” he began.

  I clubbed him in the jaw with the rifle butt; the blow twisted his head, and he had to fight to keep from overreacting and strangling himself. I kept talking to him, I told him if he confessed his sins I might give him a chance to live. I was very convincing in this. He was reluctant at first, but then his sins came pouring out: rape, massacre, torture, everything I’d expected. He seemed emptied afterward, drained of strength, as if the secret knowledge of his crimes had been all that sustained him.

  “Say a hundred Hail Marys,” I told him, and made the sign of the cross in the air. “Jesus forgives you.”

  He started to say something, but I stuffed the gag back in.

  Sherril was staring at him, her face cold, unre
lenting.

  I kissed her, intending to cheer her, boost her spirits, but when I looked at Pedroza, I had the idea that the kiss had wounded him. I kissed her again, touched her breasts. He squeezed his eyes shut, then opened them very wide; he wriggled a bit. Sherril knew what I was up to, and she was all for it; her antipathy for the major was as strong as mine. We spread our clothes on the stones and we made love a second time, showing Pedroza the sweetness that life can be, letting him understand the entire pain of his fate—once again it seemed the only thing we could do. He was nothing to us, he was simply everything, an abstract, a target as worthlessly neutral as a president.

  By chance, we were making love beneath the crack in the limestone, and a slant of dusty sun like those you might see falling through a high cathedral window fell across Sherril, painting a strange golden mask over her eyes and nose, the sort of half-mask worn by women at carnivals and fancy balls, creating of her face a luminous mystery. And what we were doing did seem mysterious, directed, inspired. It was no performance; it was ritual, it was a kind of hateful worship. We were very quiet, even at the end we stifled our cries, and the silence intensified our pleasure. Afterward, though I could hear the glutinous noise of Pedroza’s breath, it was as if we were alone with our god in that holy dome of stillness, the white cold walls like the inside of a skull, and we were its perfect thoughts. I felt incredibly tender. I caressed and kissed her, I accepted her caresses and kisses, bathed in that streak of gold, illuminated, blessed in our purpose. I suppose we were mad at that moment, but we were mad like saints.