by Robert Stone
“I don’t have much choice, do I?”
“I don’t think so, Frank. You’re lucky. You’ll make it.”
“Me, too,” Pablo said. “Always been.”
“Christ,” Holliwell said. He glanced at the priest at the foot of Pablo’s bed. “What about you, Father?”
“I’m not as lucky as you two. Anyway I’m staying here.”
“It’s the best thing, Frank. I was going to leave Pablo with Charlie but it’ll be better for both of them if he goes with you.”
“All right,” Holliwell said. “Let’s do it.”
While the Caribs stared their prisoners down, Justin and Holliwell set about gathering such supplies as would be needed for the passage out to sea. In the kitchen they loaded a crate with fruit: pineapples, papayas, a few dozen lemons. Half the canned food left in the larders went in with it, mainly the corned beef and beans on which Egan subsisted. They took turns laboring over the kitchen pump, bringing up enough water to fill a fifty-liter drum. When they had enough of everything, they pressed two of the captured troopers into service to help them carry the lot to the boathouse; one of the rebel gunmen posted on the road went along as escort. The small procession marched across the beach, past the corpses of the slain Guardia men and onto the small dock. With Holliwell standing in the whaler, they passed the provisions along hand to hand, feeling out each load from each other’s arms in nearly complete darkness. From the open boat-house, they took the last half-filled drum of gasoline, some kerosene, a plastic funnel.
When they got back to the road, the two pickup trucks stood loaded and the insurrectionist commander was bringing his men in from the surrounding woods to gather along the road. The commander was a bookkeeper in the employ of an Alvarado brothel and he was still in shock as a result of his earlier successful skirmish with the Guardia. His eyes were glazed with nervous fatigue, he continually ran his hand across his face in the manner of one disoriented. In fact his sense of reality had been subverted by the action; his upbringing had been gentle by the standards of Tecan and his only prior experience of massed weaponry and its effects had been at the cinema. He did not know what to make of Holliwell and consequently ignored him. The bookkeeper was a short heavy young man with a jowly spoiled-child’s face. Holliwell found him sympathetic.
As Holliwell stood by, he told Justin that there was not room in the trucks for his men, the medical supplies and the prisoners together. Justin suggested that the prisoners would have to walk. This made the bookkeeper unhappy; he had spoken eloquently to them and they had listened to him and enlisted under his command and he did not want to lose them. Nothing of the sort had ever happened to him before. Listening in, Holliwell envied him too. He had had a moment.
Justin and the bookkeeper agreed that it was necessary to abandon the mission now. The volume of fire from the direction of town seemed to have decreased but it was heavier in the hills behind them. And there was heavy firing now to the south, where there had been little before. It was the direction in which they were headed.
They went upstairs to the dispensary and the bookkeeper began to address his huddled prisoners. He told them what his job had been until the day before and how never before had he known who he was, but in the revolution he had found his freedom as they would find theirs. He hoped that they would keep faith with him and take their place in the revolution even though it meant they would have to walk to it and surrender all over again. If he were an evil man like their officers, he told them, he might simply have killed them. If he had been captured by them, he pointed out, they would certainly have been ordered to kill him and would have done so under compulsion. Saying so much, the bookkeeper seemed hardly to believe it, although it was true enough. He was an eloquent young man. He had been overqualified as a brothel’s bookkeeper but one often met over-qualified people in that part of the world.
While Justin went off to get a reserve of clean bandages and some antibiotics for Pablo, Holliwell walked to the young man’s bedside to see who it was he would be sharing an pen boat with. Father Egan was still sitting at the foot of the bed.
“You two haven’t really met, have you? This is Holliwell, Pablo. He’s an anthropologist. And this is Pablo.”
“How’re you feeling, Pablo?” Holliwell asked.
“Could be better,” Pablo said. Holliwell came to the disturbing conclusion that he was being sized up for a mark. It occurred to him that Pablo might not even realize what he was about, that it was simply his manner. “What you doin’ in this here shithole, cousin?”
“I was doing a study,” Holliwell said.
Pablo laughed, after a fashion. “Yeah?”
Holliwell walked away and met Justin halfway across the room, carrying Pablo’s medicine.
“Who is this kid?” he asked her.
“Nobody exactly knows. Charlie Egan says the law’s after him and that’s good enough for me. He’s probably off a boat.”
Holliwell said nothing.
He and Justin lifted the young man out of bed and stood him on his feet as the Indian prisoners and the bookkeeper watched. When he was upright, the young man turned to Father Egan.
“You think it’s gonna be all right?” He asked the priest. Holliwell was touched.
“Yes, it’ll be all right, Pablo. It’ll always be all right for you.”
Pablo smiled; he looked at Justin and Holliwell with what Holliwell would have sworn was triumphant malice. Then his features clouded.
“Where’s my knife?” he demanded.
Father Egan reached under the bedclothes to withdraw a huge diver’s knife in a plastic sheath.
Pablo took it from him.
“You gotta have a knife, right? To cut stuff with.”
“Want me to carry it?” Holliwell asked.
“That’s all right,” Pablo said, and took it.
The three of them walked down to the boat. From time to time, Pablo put his hand on Holliwell’s shoulder and leaned his weight on it. Behind them, the trucks started their engines. The bookkeeper and his prisoners descended from the dispensary, picking up the hurricane lamps as they came.
Holliwell and Justin helped Pablo down into the whaler. He crawled to the bow and worked the forward seat out of the bulkheads and lay down on a damp tarp.
“Can you … run it?” Justin asked Holliwell.
“Sure.”
“There’s a compass in it for what that’s worth. Keep to the right going out. There are reefs.”
“Do you think I betrayed you?” Holliwell asked her. “I didn’t mean it to be like that.”
“I’m sure you didn’t. I know you didn’t. Like you said, it doesn’t matter.” She touched him very lightly on the arm. “Who knows where we’re both going?”
“I’ll met,” he said.
“I have no regrets now. Not now.”
“Goodbye. Love.”
“Oh, Frank,” she said quickly, as though she were embarrassed. She turned away and he could hardly hear her. “Sure. Goodbye, Frank.”
When he started up the engine, he tried to watch her walk off, but the darkness swallowed her at once. Someone called to her, the headlights of the pickup trucks went on.
As he nosed the boat away from the dock, he thought of the reefs and swallowed hard. He could feel the young man, Pablo, watching him from the bow, seeing, somehow, through the darkness.
In the gathering heat of day, they brought May Feeney to the justicia. She rode beside a Guardia lieutenant with fair, freckled skin, light blue eyes and a tweedy brown moustache. The lieutenant said not a word to her but for the whole dreadful length of the ride he kept his hand under her skirt. Poking, idling there. She could only sit as far away from him as there was space in the seat and she kept her eyes down, from shame and so as not to see him.
In the square where everyone had come to see the waxen Christ, the vultures had come down from the treetops and were hopping delicately about the walks and lawns. There was a long line of them on the roof of the Mun
icipalidad. They moved their necks from side to side like mechanical creatures to fix their bright bead eyes in turn on every aspect of the scene below. But the streets and the square were deserted now.
The blue-eyed lieutenant conducted her past the ocher columns and under the flattened arch surmounted with the seal of the Republic. His demeanor was formal; his hand on her arm was different, his touch neither gallant nor brutal but strangely correct. It was as though to touch her any place but where he had in the car was distasteful to him.
Inside the Guardia’s building a half dozen corporals in fatigues were listening to the radio. An actor was addressing the nation, encouraging its continuing struggle for liberty. The Communist aggressor was defeated, he assured it, and was fleeing before the Guardia’s victorious arms, wielded in the name of civilization and Christianity. The Guardia corporals watched May come in; all of them had moustaches, which in the mountains were an emblem of white blood. Some smiled, others seemed uninterested.
They went beyond the outer office into a long room with bricked-over windows and a bad smell. Campos was there. She had known when they took her that he would be waiting somewhere.
“You shudder,” he said.
It was true. Her knees trembled. She could feel the blood leave her face. Her heart turned.
“I had her up the ass, so you’re too late,” the blue-eyed officer said. He was merry. He did a business with his finger, flourishing it under his nose, thrusting it before Campos. He laughed and May thought it odd to hear a human laugh and to be so utterly outside the laughter, as excluded from the impulse that quickened it as the lizards on the wall.
Then Campos touched her under the elbow, rather as the other officer had done, and drew her to an unpainted door that opened to a shed and a courtyard. Before her were lines of coffined dead in the uniform of the Guardia and beyond them, in the courtyard, the bodies of peasants stacked in piles, swelling in the sun, stinking and beset with flies. One of the bodies was that of the bookkeeper who had commanded for a while. She turned away.
“The dead,” he told her. “On account of you.”
As hard as she could, she tried to make herself speak, to shout, to answer, to give him the lie. But at the sight of the corpses she was so undone and her fear of him so great that she could not utter a sound at first. When she tried too hard, a sob broke from her throat and echoed in the stone room. She hated to hear it. It dishonored her. Yet she needed to hear it—a token of herself, a sound—even if it was her own crying. It was all of her that was there. The rest was Enemy. The blue-eyed officer threw back his head and softly made the howl of a wolf, in mockery of her. Then he went out and she was alone with Campos.
The sound of the radio carried through, very faintly, from the outer office. It seemed to catch Campos’ attention for a moment; he walked to the door that led to that office and opened it, standing with his head cocked to hear an exalted female voice complete an announcement. Then he closed the door and walked back to where she stood. She saw now what he plainly was and why she had always been so afraid of him. She saw that she would be spared nothing and that she must try to be ready.
When he began, she thought: I must do this, I must finish this, not him. She cast the compassing of her mind as high and wide as she could reach toward strength and mercy. She cried because, at first, there was nothing at all. Only the blows falling.
Though he beat her beyond fear, she kept trying. Until she was awash in all the shameful juices of living and she still kept on. Though she forgot in time who he was and what the pain was about she was able to think of the tears, the blood, and mucus and loose teeth in her mouth: these are not bad things, these are just me and I’m all right.
His electricity was shaking her loose of her bones. She never worried about screaming. The shocks blinded her, they were going to kill her.
“My dad would fix you, you sucker,” she said.
He had hurt her head somehow and closed off light. She knew it would not get better and that she would never come back. She reached out as she had to the unresponding sea in the empty afternoons of the past months and still there was nothing and she cried. She could only live between shocks and the time was so precious. She was no hero.
Sometimes the best I’m capable of, she told him, is a little quiet probity. Tried to tell him.
Once she saw her fingers moving and she knew the electricity must be moving them. Her ring was gone. Then something began to come and she did not recognize it. She asked herself what it was when she had the time, in between. Whether it was inside or out there. Whatever it was, there was hardly anything else. It was greater than electricity and electricity was strong. It was stronger than the strong, stronger than love. It seemed as though it might be love. She was too weak to bear it. Too tired for it.
You after all? Inside, outside, round and about. Disappearing stranger, trickster. Christ, she thought, so far. Far from where?
But why always so far?
“Por qué?” she asked. There was a guy yelling.
Always so far away. You. Always so hard on the kid here, making me be me right down the line. You old destiny. You of Jacob, you of Isaac, of Esau.
Let it be you after all. Whose after all I am. For whom I was nailed.
So she said to Campos: “Behold the handmaid of the Lord.”
At dawn Tecan was only a wall of richly green mountains. Holliwell had never seen her in that aspect. The sight aroused in him something that was, against reason, like desire.
Lighted ships had been passing in sight of them all during the night, but never close enough to threaten or tempt them to shout in hope of rescue. Holliwell had found a flashlight in a gear locker beside the fuel tank and tried to signal; there had been no result. He supposed that the beam was too weak or that it appeared to be a coastal light. Now, under the radiant dawn, there was plenty of shipping about. Three small freighters were steaming northward, outlined against rosy clouds; none of them was more than a few miles away. In daylight, it seemed unlikely to Holliwell that one would stop, even if a lookout saw the whaler.
His companion, Pablo, seemed untroubled by their situation. Some private emotion was aboil in him. He lay spread out in the bow while Holliwell steered, his eyes fixed on the sky. Holliwell watched the young man for a while, then looked away.
The sea’s surface had turned a gentle aqua green; within minutes it would be the mirror of a burning sky. Holliwell felt for his sunglasses and found them in his shirt pocket. Miraculously, absurdly, he had preserved them unbroken.
“There’s so much stuff,” Pablo said. There was a small vial in his hand; he was preparing to take another of his pills. The pills had made him talkative during the night and Holliwell had pretended sleep. But he had listened well enough to be disturbed by Pablo’s talk and eventually to be frightened. Pablo, whoever he was, appeared to be crazy, constantly stoned and fired with indiscriminate violence.
“More stuff in the world than anybody could imagine, brother.”
“Indeed,” Holliwell said.
Pablo unfurled a daft threatening smile.
The morning sun came down on them like a blow. The wind and the ocean were gentle; a mild offshore zephyr kept them rolling slowly north by east without benefit of the engine. Holliwell turned from Pablo’s jeering face to scan the horizon for signs of shifting weather. By any auguries he knew, the sky portended nothing sinister.
“What do you think, Pablo?” Holliwell asked. “Good weather hold?”
He kept trying to start useful conversations with the youth, trying to discover an aspect in which Pablo did not seem demented and dangerous. He had not been having much luck.
“Yeah,” Pablo said carelessly. “Weather’s fine.”
He leaned back against the boards and let his eyes roll heavenward.
“I mean there’s more stuff, man … nobody knows.”
Holliwell shivered in spite of the heat. He took a Dramamine from his own pill bottle.
“Well,” h
e told Pablo after a while, “I’m going to start the engine up. Maybe we can get ourselves out in the shipping lane. If they see us that close up, maybe they’ll stop.”
Pablo nodded, smiling ambiguously. How mad can he be? Holliwell wondered. Doesn’t he care?
The engine declined to turn over. For nearly a quarter of an hour Holliwell labored over it without effect, then, covered with sweat, he sank back against the side of the boat. Pablo crawled aft, removed the engine cover and wiped the inside with the edge of a tarp. He checked the hose connections, squeezed the pump and returned to his space in the bow.
“Try it now, Doc.”
Holliwell pulled the cord; the Evinrude roared to life.
“Points were wet,” Pablo said. “That’s all.”
“Thanks,” Holliwell said. He felt as though his bad luck with the engine would make him seem more vulnerable and quicken Pablo’s madness. They exchanged looks. Pablo had never stopped smiling. Holliwell was learning to hate him.
“You know about those Indian carvings, right?”
“No one understands them completely. Only a few things about them.”
“Tell me,” Pablo said.
“Well,” Holliwell said with a thin smile, “a lot of them are about a rain god we call God Seven.”
“God Seven? That’s all?”
“We don’t know how to say his name.”
“Not even you?”
“No.”
Pablo looked thoughtful.
“That old man back there,” he said, “I bet you he knows.”
“There’s a king on some of the stones—well, maybe he’s a god too—but we think he’s a king. Somebody had it in for him because everywhere he’s represented they’ve chipped away his face. Nobody knows who he really was. We call him Stormy Sky.”
“Stormy Sky,” Pablo said, and then repeated the words under his breath. “Hey, tell me about those human sacrifices. What were they about?”
“Whatever they’re always about. The Indians didn’t invent human sacrifice.”