by Robert Stone
Egan had sunk to the ground and lay resting against the stela. It seemed to him that he had made it come out all right. His hand was on his briefcase, over the bulge of his bottle of Flor de Cana.
“No, no,” he told the girl kindly. “That’s not the same at all. That’s a fairy tale.”
Justin had spent the morning making inventory and talking to a man from the shipper’s office in town. They had told her that it would be easier and more economical to load the mission’s promptuary equipment on shipboard at Puerto Alvarado than to ship it by way of the capital. He would have a ship with available holding space quite soon.
A short time after noon she was standing in the kitchen when she turned and saw the young Tecanecan woman to whom she had spoken on the beach the week before. The young woman had come up the front steps without a sound. Justin had never learned her name.
“I don’t think I can come here again,” the young woman said. “Only in emergencies.”
Justin led her into the kitchen.
“You’re right. You shouldn’t risk coming here. I sent you a note through the sexton.”
“I have an answer for you from those in charge,” the young woman said. “They agree that you can’t be involved further. They say only continue to leave the dock lights on, this is all they ask.”
“That’s not much to ask.”
“They say it’s well you’re preparing to leave. We’re all in great danger now. If things don’t happen soon we’ll have to go for the mountains.”
“Will it be soon?”
“I think so but I know very little. Only those in charge know.”
“Well,” Justin said, “I suppose I’m out of it now.”
“You’re out of it. But listen—when it starts, nobody is going to be safe. There are medical supplies here and they’ll be wanted.”
“When we go I’ll lock up as much as I can in the building. They’re at your disposal.”
“If it should be that you’re still here when it comes, you might be safer with us. You can make your own decision. I’ll try to get word to you beforehand but there may not be time.”
“Thank you,” Justin said. “I’ll be all right.”
“They also say thanks. Those in charge.”
“Yes,” Justin said.
As the girl was leaving, Justin went a step after her.
“How’s Father Godoy?”
“Gone,” the girl said. “Gone to the Montana.”
When the girl was gone, Justin felt desperate. Desperate to leave, to be gone—because their idleness and uselessness seemed more shameful than ever now that they could not actively help. Her work now would consist in persuading Charlie Egan to leave with her.
Thinking of Egan put her in mind of the man she had seen at Playa Tate and who was supposed to be taking the priest to dinner. He was a very self-confident man, very assured, rather arrogant. It seemed to her that she came very close to disliking him. For some reason, she did not altogether. It might be that he reminded her of someone, she thought.
Then the weight of things came down on her. The six years, everything that had happened since the day of the fiesta, Godoy, the child killings. A storm broke inside her, leaving her feeling for all the world as she had felt sometimes as a child—ashamed of her own triviality and insignificance, ashamed above all of her own body and its gross necessities, its rankness, its sinfulness, its carnality. She had stopped eating then, hoping to die. She found now that she couldn’t stay still, couldn’t put one thought in front of another, couldn’t cry. She stood in the kitchen staring through the open door at the rectangle of raw mindless sky and waiting, more alone—and more lonely—than she had ever been.
Holliwell had had a hard day and he spent a large part of it trying not to get drunk. Finless, he had been going back and forth between the hotel beach and his bungalow. The hotel was suddenly full of people who described themselves to each other as contractors, and although they reminded him in some ways of the contractors he had known in Vietnam, they seemed to him at once more sinister and less colorful. Pale and foul-mouthed, they were everywhere—drinking beer at the water’s edge, crowding the bar; they talked about Bogotà, Managua, Zihuatanejo and what they called Cancún City. Many of them seemed to be old acquaintances of Heath and Señor Soyer, the Cuban hardware man. Others were friends of Olga and Buddy. When they were quiet it meant they were on about coke or emeralds. It was as though there was some convocation of evil elements, a jar culture oozing out and discovering itself.
He parked his rented jeep beside the road, mounted the mission steps and walked straight into her in the kitchen. She looked ominously solemn.
“You know I don’t know your name?” Holliwell said.
“Justin Feeney,” she said. Perplexed, he thought, and weary.
“Is Father Egan around?”
She shook her head.
“He’s back in the ruins. I’m sure he forgot about dinner with you. I should have told you he would.”
“Maybe I should go back and talk to him.”
“It’s too far,” she said. “It’ll get dark and you’ll lose your way. And he won’t go with you. He’s out of it.”
Holliwell turned to look at the sky’s light.
“He’s in a bad way,” Justin Feeney told him.
“So be it,” Holliwell said. “I sure would like a look at those ruins once.”
“How’s your leg?”
“Fine,” he said. He looked at her; it seemed she had not moved at all since his coming in.
“You must have rented that jeep and everything,” she said. “I’m really sorry.”
“Nothing to be done, I guess.”
“Do you like brandy?” she asked.
“Sure.”
She went into the dispensary wing and came out with a small bottle of medicinal brandy and a bottle of agua mineral.
“You have some,” Holliwell said, when she had opened them. She seemed not to hear.
“I’d take you back to the ruins myself if there was time,” she said. “But there isn’t. It’ll be too dark to see anything.”
“Another time.” He felt her eyes on his face as he drank.
“Listen,” he said when he had finished the brandy, “how about you coming in to town with me? I’d just as soon not go back to the Paradise.”
“No,” she said, and laughed nervously. “No, it’s not possible.”
“Sure?”
“No,” she said firmly. “Not possible.”
“O.K.,” Holliwell said. He wanted not to leave. “Do you suppose I could have another brandy?”
“You shouldn’t,” she told him. “Your system’s been poisoned.”
“My leg’s fine. The rest of me could use a little bracing.”
“You shouldn’t,” she told him.
“Well, hell,” Holliwell said. “Checked at every turn.”
“All right,” Justin said. She went back into the dispensary and when she came out she had two bottles of brandy, together with the bottled water. When she poured his, she poured one for herself.
“Is something wrong?” Holliwell asked, seeing her.
“I’d like to go into town for dinner,” Justin told him. “I will.”
“You will?”
“Yes,” she said. “Yes, please.”
Holliwell was smiling uncertainly.
“Fine,” he said after a moment.
“We could go,” the nun said, “to the Chinese restaurant in town. It’s not too bad.”
“That’s fine,” he said.
There was something wrong, he decided. It was not the bad atmosphere he had brought from the hotel, or his disorientation or the pain in his knee, which burned now with the liquor. The woman was on wires, her eyes were wide open and staring, her mouth slightly open as though she had received a blow. She had the most beautiful eyes, he thought.
“Why don’t I drive in,” Justin said. “You can leave your jeep here if you like.”
“Y
ou’re afraid I’ll pass out at the wheel?”
“You might well,” she said. “But I just thought you’d be more comfortable.”
“That’s kind of you,” he said. “I would be.”
She was trying very hard to be cool, he thought, enjoying herself a little; she seemed to really want to come along with him. But she could not quite get it together. She was up to something. Drinking his drink, watching her, he felt a certain regret at having come. He was thinking that there was going to be trouble and that she knew it and was afraid. And although he was certainly neither a spy nor an informer, although his visit was an innocent one—he was not the company she should be keeping.
They drove in silence through the brief dusk and into the night. The ghostly sparkle of the sea was on their right; on their left the darkness compounded itself into the mass of the Sierra. It was a ride on the edge, among half-seen and unseen things, an increasingly tense and uneasy-making ride for Holliwell. He caught glimpses of wood fires through slat doorways, of fires in the cane fields. Beside him at the wheel, a frozen-faced female stranger possessed of some taut strength he felt himself to be somehow taxing. But it was beautiful there; the wind was what God had meant the wind to be, fresh from the ocean, unsullied by time. Smaller breezes stirred against the sea wind’s breast, carrying an iodine smell, a smell of jacaranda, of flowers he knew by half-forgotten, six-toned names from across the world—me-iang, ving, ba—the smell of villes in Ban Me Thuot, cooking oil, excrement, incense, death. The smell of the world turning. War.
It was wrong for him to be there. He had chosen to live where the world turned wrapped in illusions of peace, where all odors startled, the soul slept and dreams were only dreams. This fate-scented night brought up his wariness, his body tensed, he watched from behind the lights with the rapid eye movement of nightmare. It was war here; his nerve ends shivered like the polyps of the reef, vibrating to guns which he could almost hear.
“It’s beautiful here,” he said to her, as they turned inland and the jeep labored up a grade to the low cliffs over the delta.
“I guess it is,” the strange young woman said. The nun.
Over the dim lamps and the encircled glare of Alvarado’s naked lights, he could make out, far out to sea, a tiny beacon. It would be Camarillo, the nearest of the Corazón Islands. It was a sweet island. He had friends there once. He knew that he would not be seeing it this time around.
Descending toward the streets of town, he looked at her from time to time, trying not to let her catch him at it. She seemed, superficially, to have thrown every grain of her energy into the driving; she sat erect and rigid and the expression of mild shock in which her face was set never changed. She was stone beautiful, he thought; to his eye outrageously and provocatively beautiful, an impossible nun. And stone fierce now, her beauty suggested steel to him, steel that drew blood, the Queen of Swords.
“Not a bad town as they go,” he called to her above the engine’s whine. She nodded without looking at him, and showed her white upper teeth between the soft parted lips. He could not make himself look away from her then. She was the only person in the world. He needed to find her out and love her. Bad luck, he thought. Bad luck for both of them.
She guided him along mud streets, past square cement houses to the Gran Mura de China. It was a lime-green wooden building beside the river, the interior done up with a little halfhearted chinoiserie. There were plastic tables and fringed lanterns and a three-dollar dragon tapestry over a counter where a pale middle-aged Chinese woman leaned beside her abacus. A party of four Greek ship’s officers were eating steak and eggs at one end of a long table in the back of the room.
Justin exchanged a few pleasantries with the Chinese woman and then took Holliwell up a flight of stairs to a balcony where there was a table with a window overlooking the slightly fetid harbor. The breeze was fresh enough to make it the most pleasant table in the place. Dragons notwithstanding, there was nothing to be had that night except tough steak and eggs and jalapeños. They started out with Germania beer, served them by a Chinese girl of twelve or so.
“You must have been very young when you came,” Holliwell said.
“I was twenty-two,” she said. “I did my last year of nursing with them—the Devotionists.”
He wanted to ask if she had desired to go where springs failed not.
“Why them?”
“It must have been a newspaper ad,” she said. “Isn’t that silly?”
He thought it was very peculiar. He was silent.
“I was in Los Angeles at Cedars Hospital. I came from the country, you see, from Fairfield, Idaho. I didn’t like Los Angeles. I was after God, all that. They wanted me.”
God. All that. Yes, indeed, he thought. Life more abundant. More.
“I always thought of them as being in another century. I mean more than the others.”
“No,” she said, “no more than the others. They have lots of good women doctors.”
He nodded enthusiastic agreement.
“A lot of religious used to think of them as low Irish. Still do, I guess.”
“I know that to be true,” Holliwell said. “Part Jesuit as I am. There is a grain of truth in it, is there not?”
“I’m a grain of truth in it,” Justin said.
Her voice made him think of clear water, running over smooth stones. Gold-flecked pebble bars in the south fork of the Salmon. The fool’s gold and the real stuff.
“Why a nurse and not a doctor? I mean … not that there’s anything wrong with nursing.”
“The status side of it doesn’t really worry me. I don’t guess it occurred to me then that I could be a doctor. I was a girl, right? You think they had women doctors up there in Zion?”
“I suppose not when I was younger,” Holliwell said. One of us, he thought, has got to calm down. “I thought maybe by your time they had.”
“No,” she said. She sipped her beer and touched the paper napkin to her lips, staring all the while. “You know,” she said, “you look a bit spaced. Are you all right?”
“I’m perfectly well,” he said very slowly. “If you don’t mind my saying so, you look a little spaced yourself.”
“Oh,” she asked, “do I?” She tried to laugh. “Well, I am.” She tried again. “Because we’re moving out. And we’re so busy.”
“We should take things easy now. We’re not working at the moment.”
Holliwell called to the child for more beer.
“It’s terrible beer,” Justin said.
“Yes, it certainly is.”
Somehow, he thought, he was going to have to tell her about the whole business—Marty Nolan, Ocampo, all of it. He would have to explain himself and that would be the hard part. His presence did not explain well. He had followed disordered circumstance, coincidence, impulse and urging so heedlessly that the logic of his to-ings and froings had evaporated. He made no sense. Except as an agent of Nolan’s.
If he did not tell her, it might be more dangerous for her. She was in some danger already. If he did tell her, it would quite likely be dangerous for him.
“I’ve heard talk of you around,” he said to her. “You’ve apparently made an impression here.”
“What have you heard?”
“There are people who think you’re a radical of some kind.”
“Who?”
“Local people. I met a man at Playa Tate the other day after I spoke with you. He didn’t seem to like you.”
She seemed neither surprised nor alarmed.
“There are people here who hate my guts. They’re all I have to show for being here. The local Guardia, for instance.”
“That’s interesting,” Holliwell said. “Why’s that?”
“Oh,” she said, “because when the mission was open I was running some projects they didn’t like. I was training women in some basic nursing and it got sort of political. There were other things too. Anything like that gets them uptight. And I was friendly with some church
people who were suspected of being anti-government. I still am.”
“That doesn’t sound so bad.”
“Maybe not to you. But it’s enough for the Guardia.”
“I thought it was dangerous to have misunderstandings with the Guardia.”
“I’m leaving, see, so my war’s over. They win. I quit.”
“The man at Playa Tate was pretty nasty.”
“Do you know his name?”
Holliwell thought about the question for a moment and decided to stall. It was bad business.
“Didn’t catch it.”
“Cuban?”
“I think so.”
“I know who it was. He’s a big-time hardware person. He’s nice enough when I see him but I understand he has Fidel on the brain.”
“I think it’s all a bit frightening,” Holliwell said.
“They spy on me—the Guardia do. I don’t think they can do much more than that.”
Suddenly, he realized that she was frightened. Fear was one of the elements composing her state that evening. What she needed was a friend. And what she has, he thought, is me.
“I hope you’re being careful.”
“You better be careful too, you know.” He watched her glance about the room. “You don’t want to be here when it goes.”
“Is it imminent?”
“I only know what I hear. I hear … a lot.”
The beer came and Justin hastened to change the subject. She was a bit frantic, manic.
“You can’t drink both of those beers,” she told him. “You’ll be ill. I’ll have to drink one.”
“Sorry about that,” he said. “It is sporting of you.”
“You’re damn right it is, this horse piss.”
“You certainly don’t have the manner of a nun, do you?”
“Horse piss is in Shakespeare,” she said. “In The Tempest.” And then she suddenly looked sad.
Holliwell felt she would be easier to deal with that way, although she had broken his heart with horse piss in The Tempest. He was more in love than he could ever remember. And the beer was truly dreadful.
“Do you feel good about your six years here? I mean have you …”
“Have we brought spiritual guidance to the soul and temporal health to the body of our flock?”