The Best of Lucius Shepard

by The Best of Lucius Shepard (v5. 5) (epub)

  Despite a litter of rubble and cardboard sheeting, the concrete looked pure under the moon, blazing bright, like a fragment of snowy light not quite hardened to the material; and as he ascended he thought he could feel the bridge trembling to his footsteps with the sensitivity of a white nerve. He seemed to be walking into darkness and stars, a solitude the size of creation. It felt good and damn lonely, maybe a little too much so, with the wind flapping pieces of cardboard and the sounds of the insects left behind. After a few minutes he glimpsed the ragged terminus ahead. When he reached it, he sat down carefully, letting his legs dangle. Wind keened through the exposed girders, tugging at his ankles; his hand throbbed and was fever-hot. Below, multi-colored brilliance clung to the black margin of the east bank like a colony of bioluminescent algae. He wondered how high he was. Not high enough, he thought. Faint music was fraying on the wind—the inexhaustible delirium of San Francisco de Juticlan—and he imagined that the flickering of the stars was caused by this thin smoke of music drifting across them.

  He tried to think what to do. Not much occurred to him. He pictured Gilbey in Panama. Whoring, drinking, fighting. Doing just as he had in Guatemala. That was where the idea of desertion failed Mingolla. In Panama he would be afraid; in Panama, though his hand might not shake, some other malignant twitch would develop; in Panama he would resort to magical cures for his afflictions because he would be too imperiled by the real to derive strength from it. And eventually the war would come to Panama. Desertion would have gained him nothing. He stared out across the moon-silvered jungle, and it seemed that some essential part of him was pouring from his eyes, entering the flow of the wind and rushing away past the Ant Farm and its smoking craters, past guerrilla territory, past the seamless join of sky and horizon, being irresistibly pulled toward a point into which the world’s vitality was emptying. He felt himself emptying as well, growing cold and vacant and slow. His brain became incapable of thought, capable only of recording perceptions. The wind brought green scents that made his nostrils flare. The sky’s blackness folded around him, and the stars were golden pinpricks of sensation. He didn’t sleep, but something in him slept.

  A whisper drew him back from the edge of the world. At first he thought it had been his imagination, and he continued staring at the sky, which had lightened to the vivid blue of pre-dawn. Then he heard it again and glanced behind him. Strung out across the bridge, about twenty feet away, were a dozen or so children. Some standing, some crouched. Most were clad in rags, a few wore coverings of vines and leaves, and others were naked. Watchful; silent. Knives glinted in their hands. They were all emaciated, their hair long and matted, and Mingolla, recalling the dead children he had seen that morning, was for a moment afraid. But only for a moment. Fear flared in him like a coal puffed to life by a breeze and then died an instant later, suppressed not by any rational accommodation but by a perception of those ragged figures as an opportunity for surrender. He wasn’t eager to die, yet neither did he want to put forth more effort in the cause of survival. Survival, he had learned, was not the soul’s ultimate priority. He kept staring at the children. The way they were posed reminded him of a Neanderthal grouping in the Museum of Natural History. The moon was still up, and they cast vaguely defined shadows like smudges of graphite. Finally Mingolla turned away; the horizon was showing a distinct line of green darkness.

  He had expected to be stabbed or pushed, to pinwheel down and break against the Río Dulce, its waters gone a steely color beneath the brightening sky. But instead a voice spoke in his ear: “Hey, gringo.” Squatting beside him was a boy of fourteen or fifteen, with a swarthy monkeylike face framed by tangles of shoulder-length dark hair. Wearing tattered shorts. Coiled serpent tattooed on his brow. He tipped his head to one side, then the other. Perplexed. He might have been trying to see the true Mingolla through layers of false appearance. He made a growly noise in his throat and held up a knife, twisting it this way and that, letting Mingolla observe its keen edge, how it channeled the moonlight along its blade. An army-issue survival knife with a brass-knuckle grip. Mingolla gave an amused sniff.

  The boy seemed alarmed by this reaction, he lowered the knife and shifted away. “What you doing here, gringo?” he asked.

  A number of answers occurred to Mingolla, most demanding too much energy to voice; he chose the simplest. “I like it here. I like the bridge.”

  The boy squinted at Mingolla. “The bridge is magic,” he said. “You know this?”

  “There was a time I might have believed you,” said Mingolla.

  “You got to talk slow, man.” The boy frowned. “Too fast, I can’t understan’.”

  Mingolla repeated his comment, and the boy said, “You believe it, gringo. Why else you here?” With a planing motion of his arm he described an imaginary continuance of the bridge’s upward course. “That’s where the bridge travels now. Don’t have not’ing to do wit’ crossing the river. It’s a piece of white stone. Don’t mean the same t’ing a bridge means.”

  Mingolla was surprised to hear his thoughts echoed by someone who so resembled a hominid.

  “I come here,” the boy went on. “I listen to the wind, hear it sing in the iron. And I know t’ings from it. I can see the future.” He grinned, exposing blackened teeth, and pointed south toward the Caribbean. “Future’s that way, man.”

  Mingolla liked the joke; he felt an affinity for the boy, for anyone who could manage jokes from the boy’s perspective, but he couldn’t think of a way to express his good feeling. Finally he said, “You speak English well.”

  “Shit! What you think? ’Cause we live in the jungle, we talk like animals? Shit!” The boy jabbed the point of his knife into the concrete. “I talk English all my life. Gringos they too stupid to learn Spanish.”

  A girl’s voice sounded behind them, harsh and peremptory. The other children had closed to within ten feet, their savage faces intent upon Mingolla, and the girl was standing a bit forward of them. She had sunken cheeks and deep-set eyes; ratty cables of hair hung down over her single-scoop breasts. Her hipbones tented up a rag of a skirt, which the wind pushed back between her legs. The boy let her finish, then gave a prolonged response, punctuating his words by smashing the brass-knuckle grip of his knife against the concrete, striking sparks with every blow.

  “Gracela,” he said to Mingolla, “she wants to kill you. But I say, some men they got one foot in the worl’ of death, and if you kill them, death will take you, too. And you know what?”

  “What?” said Mingolla.

  “It’s true. You and death”—the boy clasped his hands—“like this.”

  “Maybe,” Mingolla said.

  “No ‘maybe.’ The bridge tol’ me. Tol’ me I be t’ankful if I let you live. So you be t’ankful to the bridge. That magic you don’ believe, it save your ass.” The boy lowered out of his squat and sat cross-legged. “Gracela, she don’ care ’bout you live or die. She jus’ go ’gainst me ’cause when I leave here, she going to be chief. She’s, you know, impatient.”

  Mingolla looked at the girl. She met his gaze coldly: a witchchild with slitted eyes, bramble hair, and ribs poking out.

  “Where are you going?” he asked the boy.

  “I have a dream I will live in the south; I dream I own a warehouse full of gold and cocaine.”

  The girl began to harangue him again, and he shot back a string of angry syllables.

  “What did you say?” Mingolla asked.

  “I say, ‘Gracela, you give me shit, I going to fuck you and t’row you in the river.’” He winked at Mingolla. “Gracela she a virgin, so she worry ’bout that firs’ t’ing.”

  The sky was graying, pink streaks fading in from the east; birds wheeled up from the jungle below, forming into flocks above the river. In the half-light Mingolla saw that the boy’s chest was crosshatched with ridged scars: knife wounds that hadn’t received proper treatment. Bits of vegetation were trapped in his hair, like primitive adornments.

  “Tell me, grin
go,” said the boy. “I hear in America there is a machine wit’ the soul of a man. This is true?”

  “More or less,” said Mingolla.

  The boy nodded gravely, his suspicions confirmed. “I hear also America has builded a metal worl’ in the sky.”

  “They’re building it now.”

  “In the house of your president, is there a stone that holds the mind of a dead magician?”

  Mingolla gave this due consideration. “I doubt it,” he said. “But it’s possible.”

  Wind thudded against the bridge, startling him. He felt its freshness on his face and relished the sensation. That—the fact that he could still take simple pleasure from life—startled him more than had the sudden noise.

  The pink streaks in the east were deepening to crimson and fanning wider; shafts of light pierced upward to stain the bellies of some low-lying clouds to mauve. Several of the children began to mutter in unison. A chant. They were speaking in Spanish, but the way their voices jumbled the words, it sounded guttural and malevolent, a language for trolls. Listening to them, Mingolla imagined them crouched around fires in bamboo thickets. Bloody knives lifted sunward over their fallen prey. Making love in the green nights among fleshy Rousseau-like vegetation, while pythons with ember eyes coiled in the branches above their heads.

  “Truly, gringo,” said the boy, apparently still contemplating Mingolla’s answers. “These are evil times.” He stared gloomily down at the river; the wind shifted the heavy snarls of his hair.

  Watching him, Mingolla grew envious. Despite the bleakness of his existence, this little monkey king was content with his place in the world, assured of its nature. Perhaps he was deluded, but Mingolla envied his delusion, and he especially envied his dream of gold and cocaine. His own dreams had been dispersed by the war. The idea of sitting and daubing colors onto canvas no longer held any real attraction for him. Nor did the thought of returning to New York. Though survival had been his priority all these months, he had never stopped to consider what survival portended, and now he did not believe he could return. He had, he realized, become acclimated to the war, able to breathe its toxins; he would gag on the air of peace and home. The war was his new home, his newly rightful place.

  Then the truth of this struck him with the force of an illumination, and he understood what he had to do.

  Baylor and Gilbey had acted according to their natures, and he would have to act according to his, which imposed upon him the path of acceptance. He remembered Tío Moisés’s story about the pilot and laughed inwardly. In a sense his friend—the guy he had mentioned in his unsent letter—had been right about the war, about the world. It was full of designs, patterns, coincidences, and cycles that appeared to indicate the workings of some magical power. But these things were the result of a subtle natural process. The longer you lived, the wider your experience, the more complicated your life became, and eventually you were bound in the midst of so many interactions, a web of circumstance and emotion and event, that nothing was simple anymore and everything was subject to interpretation. Interpretation, however, was a waste of time. Even the most logical of interpretations was merely an attempt to herd mystery into a cage and lock the door on it. It made life no less mysterious. And it was equally pointless to seize upon patterns, to rely on them, to obey the mystical regulations they seemed to imply. Your one effective course had to be entrenchment. You had to admit to mystery, to the incomprehensibility of your situation, and protect yourself against it. Shore up your web, clear it of blind corners, set alarms. You had to plan aggressively. You had to become the monster in your own maze, as brutal and devious as the fate you sought to escape. It was the kind of militant acceptance that Tío Moisés’s pilot had not the opportunity to display, that Mingolla himself—though the opportunity had been his—had failed to display. He saw that now. He had merely reacted to danger and had not challenged or used forethought against it. But he thought he would be able to do that now.

  He turned to the boy, thinking he might appreciate this insight into “magic,” and caught a flicker of movement out of the corner of his eye. Gracela. Coming up behind the boy, her knife held low, ready to stab. In reflex, Mingolla flung out his injured hand to block her. The knife nicked the edge of his hand, deflected upward and sliced the top of the boy’s shoulder.

  The pain in Mingolla’s hand was excruciating, blinding him momentarily; and then as he grabbed Gracela’s forearm to prevent her from stabbing again, he felt another sensation, one almost covered by the pain. He had thought the thing inside his hand was dead, but now he could feel it fluttering at the edges of the wound, leaking out in the rich trickle of blood that flowed over his wrist. It was trying to worm back inside, wriggling against the flow, but the pumping of his heart was too strong, and soon it was gone, dripping on the white stone of the bridge.

  Before he could feel relief or surprise or in any way absorb what had happened, Gracela tried to pull free. Mingolla got to his knees, dragged her down, and dallied her knife-hand against the bridge. The knife skittered away. Gracela struggled wildly, clawing at his face, and the other children edged forward. Mingolla levered his left arm under Gracela’s chin, choking her; with his right hand, he picked up the knife and pressed the point into her breast. The children stopped their advance, and Gracela went limp. He could feel her trembling. Tears streaked the grime on her cheeks. She looked like a scared little girl, not a witch.

  “Puta!” said the boy. He had come to his feet, holding his shoulder, and was staring daggers at Gracela.

  “Is it bad?” Mingolla asked. “The shoulder?”

  The boy inspected the bright blood on his fingertips. “It hurts,” he said. He stepped over to stand in front of Gracela and smiled down at her; he unbuttoned the top of his shorts. Gracela tensed.

  “What are you doing?” Mingolla suddenly felt responsible for the girl.

  “I going to do what I tol’ her, man.” The boy undid the rest of the buttons and shimmied out of his shorts; he was already half erect, as if the violence had aroused him.

  “No,” said Mingolla, realizing as he spoke that this was not at all wise.

  “Take your life,” said the boy sternly. “Walk away.”

  A long powerful gust of wind struck the bridge; it seemed to Mingolla that the vibration of the bridge, the beating of his heart, and Gracela’s trembling were driven by the same shimmering pulse. He felt an almost visceral commitment to the moment, one that had nothing to do with his concern for the girl. Maybe, he thought, it was an implementation of his new convictions.

  The boy lost patience. He shouted at the other children, herding them away with slashing gestures. Sullenly, they moved off down the curve of the bridge, positioning themselves along the railing, leaving an open avenue. Beyond them, beneath a lavender sky, the jungle stretched to the horizon, broken only by the rectangular hollow made by the airbase. The boy hunkered at Gracela’s feet. “Tonight,” he said to Mingolla, “the bridge have set us together. Tonight we sit, we talk. Now, that’s over. My heart say to kill you. But ’cause you stop Gracela from cutting deep, I give you a chance. She mus’ make a judgmen’. If she say she go wit’ you, we”—he waved toward the other children—“will kill you. If she wan’ to stay, then you mus’ go. No more talk, no bullshit. You jus’ go. Understan’?”

  Mingolla wasn’t afraid, and his lack of fear was not born of an indifference to life, but of clarity and confidence. It was time to stop reacting away from challenges, time to meet them. He came up with a plan. There was no doubt that Gracela would choose him, choose a chance at life, no matter how slim. But before she could decide, he would kill the boy. Then he would run straight at the others: without their leader, they might not hang together. It wasn’t much of a plan and he didn’t like the idea of hurting the boy; but he thought he might be able to pull it off.

  “I understand,” he said.

  The boy spoke to Gracela; he told Mingolla to release her. She sat up, rubbing the spot where Mingolla
had pricked her with the knife. She glanced coyly at him, then at the boy; she pushed her hair back behind her neck and thrust out her breasts as if preening for two suitors. Mingolla was astonished by her behavior. Maybe, he thought, she was playing for time. He stood and pretended to be shaking out his kinks, edging closer to the boy, who remained crouched beside Gracela. In the east a red fireball had cleared the horizon; its sanguine light inspired Mingolla, fueled his resolve. He yawned and edged closer yet, firming his grip on the knife. He would yank the boy’s head back by the hair, cut his throat. Nerves jumped in his chest. A pressure was building inside him, demanding that he act, that he move now. He restrained himself. Another step should do it, another step to be absolutely sure. But as he was about to take that step, Gracela reached out and tapped the boy on the shoulder.

  Surprise must have showed on Mingolla’s face, because the boy looked at him and grunted laughter. “You t’ink she pick you?” he said. “Shit! You don’ know Gracela, man. Gringos burn her village. She lick the devil’s ass ’fore she even shake hands wit’ you.” He grinned, stroked her hair. “’Sides, she t’ink if she fuck me good, maybe I say, ‘Oh, Gracela, I got to have some more of that!’ And who knows? Maybe she right.”

  Gracela lay back and wriggled out of her skirt. Between her legs, she was nearly hairless. A smile touched the corners of her mouth. Mingolla stared at her, dumbfounded.

  “I not going to kill you, gringo,” said the boy without looking up; he was running his hand across Gracela’s stomach. “I tol’ you I won’ kill a man so close wit’ death.” Again he laughed. “You look pretty funny trying to sneak up. I like watching that.”

  Mingolla was stunned. All the while he had been gearing himself up to kill, shunting aside anxiety and revulsion, he had merely been providing an entertainment for the boy. The heft of the knife seemed to be drawing his anger into a compact shape, and he wanted to carry out his attack, to cut down this little animal who had ridiculed him; but humiliation mixed with the anger, neutralizing it. The poisons of rage shook him; he could feel every incidence of pain and fatigue in his body. His hand was throbbing, bloated and discolored like the hand of a corpse. Weakness pervaded him. And relief.