by Doug Dorst
Alvaro sees the kid faintly outlined in the dark and slips over the dunes toward him. Lessons must be taught. The gambler is not a man to be trifled with.
In his tent, the general dreams:
He is younger, not yet so thick around the middle. He wears his medals, bright reminders of all he has done in the Queen’s service. Night. A whispered, vespertine invitation unfurled in the royal arbor. Tight shadows hiding pearly ankles. Bougainvillea and damiana, creeping ivies, the most fragrant of honeysuckles. Later, a surreptitious climb to her chambers. His legs wobble. His meaty lips quiver. His nose—still years away from the day it is torn off by a bullet—itches. (His nose! What a glorious nose it was, long and full, with an amiable bulb at the tip!) He tries the knob, and it turns.
Hinges creak. Then silence: a long, swollen moment. The scrape and hiss of a match, and one by one, three candles light. The Queen lifts the white sheet, inviting. She is wonderful to discover. He is forced to twist his neck. Vague sensations of galloping and trotting, advancing and encircling. She spins, a slippery diagonal glide, playing herself like the Ponziani Opening. She thrusts out. He tries not to gasp but does. The moment scares him, because he knows what will come next, what comes next every night, what comes next both in the dream and in the memory from which it steals—her jagged, mocking laugh as she grasps him by the throat, nails sharp in his flesh. With one word, with one wave of my wrist, she says, you will have nothing. You will walk along the wharves at midnight, in rags, alone, longing. And you will come to like it there, where the air reeks of waste and rotting shellfish, and where the only girls are toothless whores who beg for needles full of grace and then flick open knives, go straight for your pockets, and say “Surprise” as they slit your throat. She climbs off him, and he lies there, discarded, shrinking, and helpless, listening to threads popping as she tears the medals from his tunic.
The general awakens long enough to wonder if the traitorous Sergio had similar dreams in the nights before his head came off. It has long been said that all men who have loved the Queen are fated to dream of her.
Sergio remains silent, caught, as he was, on the wrong side of the bolo knife.
The head. The sand. The sea glowing yellow-green. Monkeys howling in the dark.
“You weren’t paying attention,” Alvaro says. “I could’ve stolen the head. Easily.”
“I heard the sand moving under your feet. You’re lucky I didn’t shoot.”
“If you lose the head, you will die. The general will demand it.”
“I’d expect nothing less. This is my duty to the cause.”
“Listen closely, kid: there is no cause. This whole war is about the general’s cock. He’d call a cease-fire in a flash if the Queen offered him another night in her bed. Do you even know why Sergio was killed? Why it’s his head upon which your life depends?”
The wind picks up, and palm trees rustle, urgent. The kid mumbles no. He hadn’t thought to ask.
“The general believes Sergio was the Queen’s lover,” Alvaro says.
“That’s impossible.”
“Exactly: impossible. When could it have happened? Sergio never laid eyes on her. He was with us from the beginning, spent every night sleeping beside us. It’s as likely that you have fucked the Queen.”
“You’re saying I couldn’t?”
“Shut up, boy. I’m saying the general is a delusional fool. He imagines rivals and traitors all around him. Today it was Sergio. Tomorrow it could be you.”
When the kid speaks, his voice flutters. “The general is a great leader,” he protests.
From inside the tent, a moan escapes the general’s throat. It drones softly on the swift salt breeze.
“The general’s mind was carried off along with his nose,” Alvaro says. “Listen. Do you hear? That’s him, huffing and puffing and yanking his cock. You’ve never heard it before? Every night, three, four, five times. Someday it’ll break off in his hand. And you speak of greatness!”
“Then why are you his teniente? Why do you fight at all?”
“I fight because I enjoy killing,” Alvaro says. “I enjoy it greatly.”
Heavy waves bully the shoreline. The kid is silent.
Alvaro smiles into the dark; faith is so easily stolen, and it is so rarely recovered. His hand shoots out to pluck the photograph from the kid’s pocket, but the kid blocks him, holds fast to his wrist with strong fingers.
“It’s mine,” the kid says.
“I don’t like you thinking about my girl like that.”
“Like how?”
Alvaro drives his knee into the kid’s groin. “Don’t play innocent,” he says. “You’re among men.”
The kid writhes in the sand and finds himself looking into Sergio’s wide and dead and fly-spotted eyes. The pain, the sight, the stench, all unbearable.
“I could just take her from you, if I wanted,” Alvaro says over him, “but I’m a sportsman, so I’ll win her back. I’ll flip a coin. If I win, you give her to me.”
The kid rolls away from the head and retches, once, twice, a third time. “If I win,” he manages, “you tell me her name. And where she lives.”
“Happily,” Alvaro says. “So. Will it be heads or castles?” The kid staggers to his feet and steps away from Sergio. “Castles.” He’s had enough of heads for one night.
The coin is in the air, spinning.
Even if the beach were bathed in moonlight, the kid would not have noticed that Alvaro had two coins in his hand, flipping one while tucking the other against the fleshy mound near his thumb.
Even if there were moonlight, the kid would not notice that the coin is now spinning from head to head, creating a blurred and fluttering but uninterrupted image of the Queen.
Even if there were moonlight, the kid would not notice Alvaro producing the second coin to show him a head and a castle, to prove that the game was fair.
And because there is no moonlight, the kid will not be able to steal one last glimpse of the photograph before handing it over.
“I hope you’ve kept the picture clean,” Alvaro says. “You’ll owe me if you’ve soiled her.”
Already the kid’s image of her is coming apart. He can recall a length of thigh, eyelashes, nipples, a glistening forehead, a mouth calling to him in a language composed solely of O sounds, but he cannot put them all together to make a woman. “I’ll win her back someday,” he says.
Alvaro laughs. “Enough. I’m tired, and you and Sergio have a long night ahead.”
The kid sniffles. “But the flies,” he says. “The smell.”
Tears roll down his face, and Alvaro has to stifle his urge to catch one on his finger so he can taste the shame. Instead, he drapes his arm around the kid’s narrow shoulders. “You want some advice? The head won’t smell so bad if you rinse it in the ocean.”
“I don’t want to touch it.”
“I will carry it for you. A courtesy between men. Come with me.”
Together they walk toward the ocean, the kid kicking sullenly through the dark sand, Alvaro buoyantly swinging the head by its long, stringy hair. At the water’s edge, before the kid can grasp what is happening, Alvaro winds up and hurls the head mightily over the waves. The kid hears a faraway splash. He scans the ocean, hoping to spot the head floating in the flickering, luminous water. Hoping even to see ripples. But the head is gone, swept away by the riptide.
Gone. The head is gone. His life is over.
“Adios, kid. It would be best if you started running now.” Alvaro smiles. Victories are rarely so complete.
The kid turns slowly in circles, as if considering a direction to run, as if the high, humid forest were not his only option. A sound comes from his throat, and it reminds Alvaro of a baby chinchilla crying for milk. Then, after a few stutter-steps in the sand, the kid sprints up the beach, taking a wide arc around the sleeping army.
Once the kid has disappeared into the trees, Alvaro strolls back to his tarp and settles down to sleep with the phot
ograph buttoned safely inside his shirt pocket. Tomorrow he can go back to selling glimpses of his girl to the men for cupfuls of foot powder, and he can get some relief for his goddamned ruined feet.
In his tent, the general awakens to the soft light of dawn. He buckles on his nose and goes out to greet the men. The morning sky is pink and gray. A barnacled black crab scuttles past his feet. Wood smoke tickles his sinuses as he watches his men rise and drift zombielike toward the fire, lining up for coffee with tin cups dangling from crooked fingers. The general takes a stick of salt-cured meat from his pack, bites into it, and chews contentedly, feeling kingly. That Alvaro, he thinks with admiration, he is a bad bishop in an extreme sense. And these men are my strong pawn center. And Sergio, a captured knight, is off this board for good.
But where is the kid? Where is the head? Where, goddamnit?
His eyes whirl out of focus. He bites his lip until he tastes blood. Is there no one he can trust? Has everyone been witched by the Queen? How many heads will he have to take? Where will he keep them? His armies will be slowed, so loaded down with heads will they be! There will be a great volley of heads over the castle walls! He will need many more catapults!
He shouts Alvaro’s name, demanding answers. A wet shred of meat falls from his mouth into the sand. He bends to retrieve it, puts it back in his mouth just as Alvaro arrives.
“I am appalled,” Alvaro says. “I thought the kid was one of us.”
Bits of sand grind the general’s teeth, but he continues to chew, loudly, adamantly. “Find him,” he says.
Alvaro salutes crisply. “You will have his head by noon.”
The general returns the salute and watches Alvaro walk among the men, choosing his tracking party. He notes with satisfaction that over the years, his teniente’s clothes have gone from a clean olive color to a deep rusty brown. This is the kind of man a general wants in his army, a man who has been flecked, spattered, daubed, smeared, and soaked with the blood of thousands. This is a man who can be believed in.
Summoning calm as only a seasoned commander can, the general gathers the rest of his men around him. He draws the day’s troop movements in the sand with a stick, pointing out each of the moves the Queen’s army might make in response and sketching countermeasures for each. Afterward, he kicks the sand clean, leaving no trace of his strategy.
Alvaro leads three other men through the forest, all of them wiry and mustachioed, eyes red-rimmed and gleaming. His pounding feet feel strong and new; he is only dimly aware of the burst blisters oozing in his boots. He stops and scans the forest around him. The kid is good, better than he expected—he has left no trail, no footprints in the wet black soil, no broken twigs, no trampled paths. Alvaro must follow his own animal instincts, and he leads the posse through barriers of fallen oaks, snarls of hyena weed, and buzzing clumps of hungry insects. He plunges through a dense thicket of saint’s-whip, and the razor-edged leaves and thorny branches slap his face, raising welts and thin, stinging cuts. He races on. This is the part he likes best.
The kid comes to the edge of the trees, many miles north of the rebel camp. He hears voices, and stops, crouches, tries to breathe softly, though his lungs are howling for air. Through the branches he can see a beach. The yellow sand is bright and unfamiliar. Playing in the waves are four young women in frilly pink suits. The water level is at their chests; when waves come, up to their necks. They laugh and splash and toss an inflated ball.
He assumes these girls have been taught to fear the rebels. He knows he must look feral and dangerous, his skin torn, his clothes heavy with black jungle muck, and he knows he must be giving off the myriad stinks of war. But still: what if he shed his cover and approached them? Even if there are men hidden nearby, guarding them—fathers and brothers and uncles, perhaps, armed with guns and knives and scythes and mauls and mattocks—how much worse could his chances be with them? To stay in the jungle alone is to be tracked relentlessly by Alvaro, a man who doesn’t just know the odds but sets them, a man who shakes fate in his fist as if it were a pair of weighted dice. Play long enough, and you will lose.
He watches. The girls bob in harmony with each lap of wave. He parts the branches for a better view and reaches into his pants; fear—or hope, or both—has stiffened him.
On the beach, ready to decamp, the general regards his men, who stand before him in a sloppy, imprecise line. Only the ones who have filled their boots with precious foot powder are standing still; the others hop from one foot to the other, their toes and heels and arches all in a misery of burn and itch. “Soon,” the general promises, “there will be powder for all. My friends, our victory shall yield endless supplies of foot powder—plenty for you and all your loved ones!”
“Friends? Loved ones?” some whisper in confusion. “¿Qué son?”
The general cuts short his inspirational speech and raises his eyes; he watches, transfixed with wonder, as the southern sky fills with orbs of color: olive and gunmetal and the white of bones. Thin cords extend from each orb, and from each set of cords hangs a man, and together the orbs and their men drift downward and sideward and downward through the blue with the unhurried grace of jellyfish in the deep. Attached to each man is a gun. Angels! Yes! Heavenly reinforcements delivered to him by a higher power whose existence he has never considered! The angels are beautiful, and their firepower much needed—although he wonders, briefly, if a heaven-sent fighting force can be as ruthless as he needs them to be.
His men shout, but he does not hear. They break for the jungle, scattering as they run. Sand flies in lovely rooster tails from beneath the flapping soles of their boots, many of which were recently stripped from the feet of corpses, as they soon will be again.
Only when he is alone on the beach and the gun-toting angels have shed their deflated orbs and are rushing into the jungle and across the beach toward him does his paretic mind absorb the truth. “Puta de muelle!” he barks, cursing the Queen. Wharf whore! It is her army! Pinning him into a corner with the rarely used but potent Schwarzschild Skewer! A savvy endgame modeled on the Karagoosian Mate! Oh, he understands his position: he is in trouble, he is faced with the zugzwang to end all zugzwangs. He should never have sent Alvaro after the kid! Alvaro would have seen this coming! Alvaro would have orchestrated a lethal counteroffensive! He unholsters his sidearm and races toward the nearest thing he can kill.
The battle is a rout. The general’s men are slaughtered, chased by the Queen’s army through the jungle, across rivulets and swamps, through gauntlets of venomous tree snakes. One by one, they are fallen upon and butchered like boars. The jungle echoes with truncated, blood-choked cries of Mamá, Mamá, Mamá.
The general is taken prisoner, bound at the wrists and ankles with barbed wire that has rusted in the humidity. The Queen’s general approaches him with a shining knife, each serration polished to high gleam.
“My orders,” the Queen’s general says, and the general nods, and his ears are sawn off.
“My orders,” the Queen’s general says, and the general nods, and his eyes are carved out.
“My orders,” the Queen’s general says, and the general nods, and a grenade is forced into his mouth. The pin protrudes like a pacifier. Shards of the general’s broken teeth litter the black sand and look at home among the pebbles and the shells and the yellowed remains of tiny crustaceans. His tin nose is unbuckled, taken for a trophy. Someone grabs his hair and holds his head steady as the Queen’s general pulls the pin. The metallic snick reverberates in his skull. The sand spray of fleeing feet stings his lips and his raw eye sockets.
He does not become a reflective man in his final moments. He does not reminisce about the pet espada monkey that he, as a boy, trained to accompany him on guiro while he played marimba. He does not contemplate the futility of war and pillage and politics and rape. He does not even count down the precious seconds he has left with his head in place. All he thinks about is the Queen and her latest rook, writhing in white sheets and candlelight and matin
g mating mating mating mating.
And what of Sergio’s head? It is several miles offshore, carried by the southeast current that each spring deposits tons of flotsam on the white-sand beaches of some small, nameless cay. The picked-clean skull will, in time, end up on the shore amid a pile of fish remains, desiccated jellies, carapaces of murdered sea turtles, and sour-smelling kelp, all of which will be coated in rainbow slicks of diesel fuel.
Years ago, Sergio might have been saved and resurrected by friendly Nereids. A trio of them might have recovered the head and spirited it away to a shimmering grotto, where they would have conjured a new body—complete with an implanted underwater breathing apparatus—and returned life to him, all the while fondling him gloriously, and he would thereafter have lived with them in benthic bliss. Alas, the Nereids are all gone, scooped up by the trawlers, pressed and vacuum-packed in their own oil.
Instead, the head is feasted upon by marine creatures. Hagfish rasp away pieces of the salt-softened f lesh. Spinner crabs twirl their claws and grind off bits of bone. Screw-fanged eels chase each other through the lank weeds of black hair.
Alvaro hears the explosion. It is but a tiny pop in the distance, filtered through thick layers of vegetation, but Alvaro knows war too well to mistake the sound. “The general is dead,” he tells the tracking party. “We shall need a new one.” He points to a thin man tugging at the ends of his droopy mustache. “Flaco,” he says, “you are now the general.”
“Not you?” Flaco asks. Age-browned scars are crosshatched into both his cheeks, severe reminders of some earlier war. Or perhaps this one. Who can remember?
Alvaro shakes his head. He has no interest in titles, in the burdens of formal command.