A Lush and Seething Hell

by John Hornor Jacobs

  I leaned into the Yamaha’s seat and smoked, waiting, looking up into blank sky, staring into the dark landscape. I sensed movement. A nocturnal raptor, maybe. The distant yips of canines or coyotes, echoing.

  When the lights appeared on the horizon, I waited, tensing. I felt as though at any moment it would slew toward me and from it erupt . . . what? Soldiers? Even worse, well-dressed Americans?

  The lights passed. A rattling pickup truck full of empty crates, red taillights illuminating the road before me. I climbed back on the Yamaha, started it, and followed the truck as closely as I dared.

  * * *

  We came to a crossroads, where there was a small family-owned gas station and mercado still open under brilliant fluorescent lights. The old beater continued on. I turned off, rolling to a stop in the white-gravel parking lot. With the lights buzzing overhead, insects swarming and batting them, the place took on a washed-out, desaturated look. I entered the mercado on loose, still-vibrating legs.

  A greasy-haired, seriously obese middle-aged woman with a goiter that looked to be strangling her said, “Hello, welcome to Gas y Mercantida Lazaro. Let me know if I can help you find anything.” It was one of those stores where they sold everything: hominy, lard, milk, cheese, wine, liquor, beer, chorizo, socks, toothpaste, shortwave radios, boots, hats, transmission fluid, oil, aspirin, tampons, velvet artworks, candles, antennae, condoms, paperbacks, cigarettes, Fanta, pornographic magazines, fireworks.

  “I think I’ve got what I need,” I said. On the counter, I placed a South American atlas, an ink pen, two large beers, peanuts, a heavy-duty flashlight and extra batteries, duct tape, two packs of Gitanes cigarettes, a knockoff Zippo with a little poncho-clad figure on a horse and the word “gaucho” embossed on the side, and lighter fluid.

  “This might sound weird, but . . . where am I?” I asked. She stared at me as if I was a lunatic. And maybe I was. “No headlight on my bike,” I added. “Got caught out of town at nightfall and had to follow a truck here.”

  “Los Gigantes,” she said.

  “It doesn’t seem so big,” I said.

  She laughed harder than she should have, glad for the nighttime company. The goitered woman, still smiling, began to ring me up, looking at each item for a price sticker and then entering the number she found into the register. “You hear about the visit?”

  “The visit?” I said. “What visit?”

  “The visit,” she said. “Everyone knows about the visit.”

  “I’m sure you have me at a disadvantage. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “The Pope,” she said. “In Magera. Where you’re from.”

  “How do you know where I’m from?” I said.

  “Look at you. Leather jacket. Big clomping boots. I can pick out a Mageran anywhere,” she said. The goiter was painful to look at, a heaving fleshy fist reaching up from the swamp of her skin.

  I can pick out a Mageran anywhere.

  “The Pope?”

  “Love is stronger, you know?” El amor es más fuerte. The lady behind the counter waved a fat hand, rings buried in the flesh of her fingers. “To heal Magera. They’re saying that Vidal is going to return the country to democratic rule.”

  I shook my head. “He won’t.”

  “No?”

  “Never,” I said. “Because we’ll kill him if he does.”

  “But the Pope said—”

  “How much is that?” I said. There was a glass case near the register, and inside it were knives of various sorts. Small plain pocketknives, larger pocketknives, even larger knives in sheaths, scenes of gauchos and nude women etched into bone handles. The prices displayed became larger with the size of the corresponding weapon. Near the bottom of the case, where the knives became less ornate and more military-looking, was a hooked blade with a crenelated back full of rip teeth taking up the width of the container, nearer to a machete than a knife. The label next to it said corvo, but did not list a price.

  “Why would you want that?” the counterwoman asked.

  “A present for my dad,” I said.

  “It’s been there for years,” she said, looking into the case. “I don’t know how much it is.”

  “The one above it is seventy-five pesos. It’s almost as big.”

  “One hundred,” she said.

  “That seems reasonable,” I said. “And the whetstone.”

  The woman added the corvo and whetstone to the tally and I paid. Outside the mercado, I sat down on the concrete slab the building was built upon, leaned back into its wall, and drank beer, watching the insects swarm the lights above the gas pumps. I filled the lighter, put the batteries in the flashlight and the extras in my backpack. I smoked and closed my eyes, waiting for dawn. No sleep would come, and dawn was a long while away. From my backpack I withdrew an envelope containing two slips of paper. I took the other from my pocket.

  Three pieces of paper, three names. But only two different sets of numbers. Had I had time to look at the paper I took from Jorge Campos’s home before now, I might have seen that two were the same.

  Opening the atlas, I held the slip bearing Alejandra near the map’s face and traced the latitude north, to somewhere in the high Mageran deserts, and followed the longitude to a point close to the Argentinian border. I marked it with an X. For Avendaño’s coordinates, I traced the remaining slips’ longitude and latitude to a blip of a coastal village, in the far north of Magera, to a town called Unquera.

  If you connected Córdoba, and the point in the high desert, and the coastal town of Unquera, it was almost a straight line, north by northwest.

  I dozed some, leaning against the wall, waiting for light. When I finally abandoned the restless half sleep, I withdrew the corvo and spat on the whetstone, running the dull blade over its rough surface, over and over. The rhythmic movement lulled me into a trance-like state, punctuated only by the steaming air brakes of big trucks pulling in to refuel. Goats bleated from livestock trailers, horses nickered, men whistled tunelessly as they walked to their vehicles, checking tires—the cacophony of transporting disparate cargos: livestock, diesel tanks, grapes, sunflower oil, wheat, corn, cotton. Work never seemed to stop in the scrub. The men paid more attention to the bike than they did to me, despite the weapon I sharpened in full view. It was Argentina—no one blinked at a naked blade. At some point the lights above the gas pumps winked out and I was left in the dark. Using my backpack as a pillow, I lay upon the concrete and slept.

  When light bloomed in the east, I remounted my bike and rode until late afternoon, covering more than seven hundred miles. The land rose and became more barren—sparse grasses dying away, leaving only bleached rock and dust, passing white at times, and then ochre, then brown, and then back to white once more. The air grew thin. The road-weariness finally settled upon me and I slept in a motel in an unknown and unnamed town for twenty-four hours, my motorcycle sharing the room with me as it had before. The phone did not ring, or if it did, I was not aware of it.

  * * *

  The next day, I came to the border. It was manned by soldiers watching the bare road from a small hut. There were no cars. The constant scouring of wind over the million summits of the mountains had softened the edges of the pass. The high salt flats had become shattered rock, like ejecta from some cosmic impact eons before where no plant, no lichen, no living thing grew. The pass was marked by a simple green sign over the highway that read paso de mazabrón limite internacional with mile markers to the next town.

  I took my bike off-road, and traveled across the scree plains, out of sight of the border guards, passing into Magera unseen, traveling fifty miles an hour, an unsafe speed on the loose rock. When the border guards and their shabby little hut were far in the distance, I returned to the highway. I felt no shock or thrill at my homecoming. No Homeric greeting by a withered ancient. I passed through the same barren landscape as before. But I was closer to the coordinates of the slip of paper bearing the name Alejandra.

  Ev
ery exile dreams of coming home. It’s the nature of our loss. Every narrative wants an end where wrongs are righted, where evil is vanquished or, failing that, at least the status quo is returned. I had longed to return for so many years, to be welcomed back with wine and bittersweet remembrance by whatever family I had left or could find. Reuniting Mageran families, after the coup, was like sweeping up the shards of a broken glass and trying to put it back together—there’s always less there than before it was broken.

  Now, though, I would have been happy simply to find Avendaño, that kind, deranged old poet. He called Neruda the father of us all, but Neruda seemed so distant and foreign to me now—some other small poet lost to some other tin-pot dictator. I didn’t think of Avendaño as a poet, I thought of the man, full of beautiful contradictions. In him, some of the wreckage of my mother and father was, if not healed, made bearable.

  By late afternoon, I approached Arriate, the town nearest to Alejandra’s coordinates. A meager cluster of stone buildings at a crossroads featured a single market, and a church. Up until then, I had seen no official Mageran vehicles, not even at the border—no police, nor army. But now, a handful of green Jeeps and trucks clustered around the church, though I saw no soldiers attending them. I pressed on as quickly as I was able, whipping through the town, stopping a mile or two out of sight in order to pull the atlas out of my leather jacket, lift my helmet’s visor, and estimate where the longitude and latitude indicated. It was an imprecise affair, since the atlas did not have either longitude or latitude marked with minutes. I had to make my best guess.

  I followed the highway toward where I thought it might be. Within moments, a rutted dirt road cut away from the highway, down a slope and then out on the rocky flats of scree where a far red hill rose above the rest of the land like a cone or loaf of sugar. I took the bike down and then up, casting a great plume of dust into the air. My heartbeat quickened, as I knew that anyone who looked in this direction, for miles, would see I traveled there.

  The sugarloaf grew in my sight, rising high, two hundred meters from the rocky flat’s floor. I came to the foot of the hill and stopped the bike and dismounted, looking to my backtrail to make sure I had not been followed. I unslung my backpack and left it leaning against the dirt bike’s front tire. I could see nothing. The sun stood fingers above the peaks to the west.

  I walked around the hill. No tracks, no sign of life, no vegetation at all. Just loose, shattered rocks. It was cold here and I was glad of the gloves and heavy boots. I kept my helmet on, to keep the swirls and lashing tendrils of salt from stinging my face, eyes.

  Walking the perimeter of the sugarloaf, I stopped. A bit of blue stood out from the rest of the landscape of scree, flapping, at the top of a rise. An irregularity in the ground, where there was a protrusion of rocks—the berm of a hole that had been dug and then refilled, maybe.

  I approached it. A piece of cloth, once bright blue, now faded and washed out from exposure to the elements. I picked it up, pulling it away from the earth that was reluctant to yield it. When it came away, I could see it was the remains of a dress. Looking down, I searched the berm, kicking the rocks with my feet. The light was failing now, long shadows pointing accusingly toward the east, stretching, stretching. A glint of metal. A bracelet. A bracelet that a young girl might wear, full of bangles and charms. A cornicen, a bird, a heart, a shoe, a baby, a fish, a sailboat.

  I fell to my knees and began tearing at the hard, rocky earth with my gloved hands, as if I could reveal something just under the earth’s crust. After finding nothing I circled the mound like a cat—like Tomás—but far less indifferently than he might. A flash caught my eye, but not on the ground. In the distance, across the salt flat, to the highway. A vehicle on the side of the road, stopped.

  A maroon van.

  Two small figures stood beside it. One raised his arm in a genial wave.

  Stuffing the bracelet into a pocket and the dress inside my jacket to rest near the atlas, I raced back to my motorcycle, slung back on my backpack, and kicked the starter violently until the machine’s sound swallowed almost everything, thinking nothing but madre de dios, madre de dios in a sort of circular and meaningless chant. It was an empty shibboleth—something my mother would mutter when I was just a girl, before she was taken away. I throttled up the bike and ran parallel to the road for a stretch, watching the figures move back to the van, open the doors, and enter. It began to move. I doubted I could outrun a vehicle on the highway, but they could never catch me out here, on the flats or in the rough terrain. The Yamaha was built for off-road travel, which was one of the reasons I bought it. I had been thinking of the state of Argentinian roads, which were notoriously bad, rather than a chase on the salt flats outrunning—whom? Who were these men? Whoever they were, they were murderers, or at least their proximity to Jorge Campos’s home was testament enough that I should be wary.

  I hung back from the highway, but soon the maroon van was pacing me. I came to a gulley, where I had to turn either toward the road or away from it, and I opted for the latter. I did not know how long it would take for whoever rode in the van to get tired of the game I played and begin firing. I took the dirt bike out beyond a ridge, out of sight from the highway. The sun had just passed beyond the mountain peaks, and the sky became blue-gray overhead and smeared with orange-pink at the edges. A half-light settled on the flats, giving it that dreamlike air, a luminous darkness; everything dimmed, yet absent of the hard contrast that direct sunlight brought, so that every detail stood clear in my sight, but fading. Caught between states for an instant. Precious but temporary.

  It was dark in minutes, and I had to decide. Press on, out here in the waste, or back to the road. If I didn’t make up my mind, any possibility of choice would be removed for me and it would be a simple matter of the passengers in the van finding a different vehicle in the night, one that could take the rocks, maneuver in the ruts and arroyos in the shadows of the Andes.

  It was not a hard decision. I formulated a plan, knowing it was folly, but lacking any better options.

  You will never be happy. Your purpose is folly. But you may find justice.

  I waited an hour for full dark; then I took the flashlight from my bag. I duct-taped it to the motorcycle’s handlebar axis, so that it shone merely ten feet in front of the dirt bike, and traced my path back, down through the gulley to the point where it rose to join the plateau of salt flat by the road. I extinguished the flashlight and killed the engine. I laid the bike on its side so it wasn’t easily spotted if the men had left the comfort of the van and had powerful lights. I removed my helmet—I was afraid its surface or visor might catch the light and glimmer—and unslung my backpack once more. My gloves, I left on.

  From there, I crept to the highway. The stars pricked the heavens and a hazy white sliver of moon rose in the east, giving me a weak, tinny light. I could not see the van from where I crouched, but the highway threaded through this part of the high mountains like a silver stream, gleaming with moonlight in the darkness. I approached it and lay on the side of the road, in the dry ditch, listening. I heard nothing. I waited, breathless, and then rose and trotted down the highway where I thought I had marked the van earlier, my breath coming hard. This country was a big space, and bigger in the dark, with rough terrain where every footfall could lead to a twisted ankle or broken leg.

  Crossing the road, I hid myself in the far ditch, and waited. Nothing.

  I was about to rise and move on when I heard the faint sound of a vehicle. Not the high-pitched whine of an engine at accelerated revolutions, but an oil and steel baritone of a machine barely idling. Lights appeared in the distance. I tried to make myself one with the earth, pressing my face into the rocks. The vehicle approached. Slowly. I did not have to look to know it was the van.

  I waited until it drew even with me. Grabbing a rock, I let the van pass—five meters, then ten, away. The red taillights burned in the darkness. I threw the rock. It missed. Stooping, I snatched up anoth
er one, took three steps with my arm cocked, and let it fly. I could not see its arcing path in the darkness, but I traced it in my mind’s eye.

  It hit the van’s roof with a hollow clong. The vehicle stopped.

  I threw myself off the road, in the ditch farthest away from my dirt bike. A door opened, then another. I allowed myself a glance. One man stood in the headlights, looking away from me, to the north, on the other side of the highway. The other crossed in front of the taillights. He said in Spanish, “Get out of the beams if you want to be able to see.” I felt as though he wanted to use profanity, but restrained himself. I recognized his voice from somewhere. Flashlights flicked on, and they scanned the north side of the road, methodically.

  I had abstractly realized they would have flashlights, but when their beams suddenly cut through the darkness, I was still surprised. The lights bobbed and wavered, searching the scree.

  Improvise, I told myself in Avendaño’s voice, as if he was saying, Surely you’ve shot a gun? A bow and arrow, like Artemis?

  I took up another rock, pushed myself off the ground into a crouch, and threw it as far as I could into the darkness on the far side of the road. It clattered faintly.

  One of the men yelped. They both moved away from the vehicle, which was still running. I ran, half-crouched, down the ditch to the van, keeping its body between myself and where I imagined the two men to be. I forced myself to cross the open space to the vehicle. Looking inside, I could see by the green dashboard light the keys dangling there. I could steal the van, I knew. But something stopped me. I cannot explain it other than I couldn’t just leave the motorcycle there in the gulley. It had served me well and I had grown to love it in some ways—that dumb collection of metal, plastic, and rubber.