We dressed, smiling at each other, unmindful of Pedroza, and it wasn’t until we began shifting the stone back in front of the cave mouth that we looked at him. He was still pleading with his eyes, wriggling toward us and whining, making choked gargling noises. I felt no sympathy for him. He deserved whatever was in store for him. He was trying to nod, aiming his eyes at the gun, begging me to shoot him.
“Adiós,” I said—a word that means “to God,” an ironic conceit of the language in these godless times.
We shifted the stone into place.
Before we set out for Flores we were brought up short by what we saw just beyond the mouth of the cave. The side of the adjoining hill was dotted with mounds of black dirt, each one about five feet long. There were hundreds of them, tucked in among ferns, under rotten logs, beneath bushes. Like infestations of ants I’d seen in South America. It was horrible to see, and thinking about those tiny deformed bodies lying moribund beneath the dirt, I became sick and dizzy. The ultimate attitude of surrender. I suppose I could have been merciful and shot them as they lay; the crates in the cave contained a sufficiency of death. But someone might have heard, and, too, I had gone beyond the concepts of mercy and humanitarian aid. I wasn’t in the game anymore. I felt bad about that, but at least I’d tried, I had spent years trying, whereas most people surrender without even making an effort. There was nothing I could do except to leave. So we walked away from the cave, from Sayaxché, from Guatemala, from those pathetic little things with slit eyes and malfunctioning brains in their sleep of dirt and nightmares, from Major Pedroza in the final white church of his terror, from the whole damn world. And because we had nowhere we wanted to go any longer, we went there together.
Sometimes I look at Sherril, and she looks at me, and we both wonder why we stay together. We’re still in love, but it doesn’t seem reasonable that love should survive an act of surrender as complete as the one we made, and we keep expecting some vile mutation to occur, the product of that night in the jungle beyond Sayaxché. I suppose that’s why we don’t have any children. We don’t think about all this very much, however. Life is sweet. We’ve got money, food, a future, a cabin in the Rockies not far from Calgary, work we care about—though perhaps not with the same passion we once evinced. It’s good to make love, to walk, to smell the wind and watch the sun on the evergreens. We’re not really happy, too much has happened for us to buy that chump; but we neither one of us ever required happiness. It’s too great a chore to be happy when the world is going down the tubes, when the shitstorm is about ready to come sweeping in from the backside of creation and surprise us with a truly disastrous plague or cosmic rays from hell, and there are signs in the sky that it’s time to get right with God or maybe make a few moves to change things, and all you hear is the same placid generic bullshit about shoring up the economy and possibly kicking a few bucks over to the extremists who would kind of like to have breathable air and keep the ice caps from melting and would prefer not to alienate the rest of humanity by supporting every sadistic tumor in a uniform who decides he’s going to be God of Mangoland and run the cocaine franchise for the South Bronx in return for saying No to the Red Menace. Central America isn’t just Central America. It’s what’s happening, it’s coming soon to your local theater, and if you think I’m overstating the case, if you don’t see the signs, if you haven’t been taking notes on the inexorable transformation of the Land of the Free into just another human slum…well, that’s cool. Just kick back, and pop yourself a cold one, maybe catch that ABC special on the Starving Man and get a little misty-eyed, it’ll make you feel cozier when it’s time for “Monday Night Football” or “Miami Vice,” like you’ve paid your dues by almost feeling something.
And don’t worry, everything’s all right.
I promise I won’t mention any of this again.
Adiós.
LUCIUS SHEPARD was born in Lynchburg, Virginia, has traveled extensively in Latin America, the Caribbean, Europe, and Asia, and presently resides in Massachusetts. In 1985 Shepard received the John W. Campbell Award for best new writer, and has won the Nebula Award for his nouvelle “R&R” and the World Fantasy Award for his previous Arkham House collection The Jaguar Hunter, one of the New York Times’s Notable Books of the Year. Novels by Lucius Shepard include Green Eyes (1984), Life During Wartime (1987), and Kalimantan (1990); the author is currently at work on the mainstream novel The End of Life As We Know It.
JEFFREY K. POTTER was born in 1956 at March Air Force Base in Southern California and is largely self-taught, though the artist-photographer acknowledges Clarence John Laughlin, Jerry N. Uelsmann, John Heartfield, and Man Ray as major creative influences. “Absolutely brilliant” was J. G. Ballard’s assessment of the Potter illustrations for Memories of the Space Age, one of over thirty books that have been graced by this artist’s fabulous photomontage technique. Over the years Potter has fashioned a mesmerizing gallery of the grotesque worthy of Richard Upton Pickman, and in 1988 he was honored with the World Fantasy Award.
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