Life During Wartime

by Lucius Shepard

  “Hey,” said Mingolla. “Don’t kill him! I know the guy. I can talk to him.”

  “Talk?” said the lazy voice. “You kin talk till yo’ ass turns green, boy, and Sammy ain’t gon’ listen.”

  Mingolla peered into the shadows. A big sloppy-looking man was leaning on the counter; brass insignia gleamed on his beret. “You the captain?” he asked. “They told me outside to talk to the captain.”

  “Yes, indeed,” said the man. “And I’d be purely delighted to talk with you, boy. What you wanna talk ’bout?”

  The other men laughed.

  “Why are you trying to kill him?” asked Mingolla, hearing the pitch of desperation in his voice. “You don’t have to kill him. You could use a trank gun.”

  “Got one comin’,” said the captain. “Thing is, though, yo’ buddy got hisself a coupla hostages back of that wall, and we get a chance at him ’fore the trank gun ’rives, we bound to take it.”

  “But—” Mingolla began.

  “Lemme finish, boy.” The captain hitched up his gunbelt, strolled over, and draped an arm around Mingolla’s shoulder, enveloping him in an aura of body odor and whiskey breath. “See,” he went on, “we had everything under control. Sammy there…”

  “Baylor!” said Mingolla angrily. “His name’s Baylor.”

  The captain lifted his arm from Mingolla’s shoulder and looked at him with amusement. Even in the gloom Mingolla could see the network of broken capillaries on his cheeks, the bloated alcoholic features. “Right,” said the captain. “Like I’s sayin’, yo’ good buddy Mister Baylor there wasn’t doin’ no harm. Just sorta ravin’ and runnin’ ’round. But then ’long comes a coupla our Marine brothers. Seems like they’d been givin’ our beaner friends a demonstration of the latest combat gear, and they was headin’ back from said demonstration when they seen our little problem and took it ’pon themselves to play hero. Wellsir, puttin’ it in a nutshell, Mister Baylor flat kicked their ass. Stomped all over their esprit de corps. Then he drags ’em back of that wall and starts messin’ with one of their guns. And—”

  Two more shots.

  “Shit!” said one of the men by the window.

  “And there he sits,” said the captain. “Fuckin’ with us. Now either the gun’s outta ammo or else he ain’t figgered out how it works. If it’s the latter case, and he does figger it out…” The captain shook his head dolefully, as if picturing dire consequences. “See my predicament?”

  “I could try talking to him,” said Mingolla. “What harm would it do?”

  “You get yourself killed, it’s your life, boy. But it’s my ass that’s gonna get hauled up on charges.” The captain steered Mingolla to the door and gave him a gentle shove toward the cordon of MPs. “’Preciate you volunteerin’, boy.”

  Later Mingolla was to reflect that what he had done made no sense, because—whether or not Baylor had survived—he would never have been returned to the Ant Farm. But at the time, desperate to preserve the ritual, none of this occurred to him. He walked around the corner and toward the retaining wall. His mouth was dry, his heart pounded. But the shaking in his hand had stopped, and he had the presence of mind to walk in such a way that he blocked the MPs’ line of fire. About twenty feet from the wall he called out, “Hey, Baylor! It’s Mingolla, man!” And as if propelled by a spring, Baylor jumped up, staring at him. It was an awful stare. His eyes were like bull’s-eyes, white showing all around the irises; trickles of blood ran from his nostrils, and nerves were twitching in his cheeks with the regularity of watchworks. The dried blood on his chest came from three long gouges; they were partially scabbed over but were oozing a clear fluid. For a moment he remained motionless. Then he reached down behind the wall, picked up a double-barreled rifle from whose stock trailed a length of flexible tubing, and brought it to bear on Mingolla.

  He squeezed the trigger.

  No flame, no explosion. Not even a click. But Mingolla felt that he’d been dipped in ice water. “Christ!” he said. “Baylor! It’s me!” Baylor squeezed the trigger again, with the same result. An expression of intense frustration washed over his face, then lapsed into that dead man’s stare. He looked directly up into the sun, and after a few seconds he smiled: he might have been receiving terrific news from on high.

  Mingolla’s senses had become wonderfully acute. Somewhere far away a radio was playing a country-and-western tune, and with its plaintiveness, its intermittent bursts of static, it seemed to him the whining of a nervous system on the blink. He could hear the MPs talking in the bar, could smell the sour acids of Baylor’s madness, and he thought he could feel the pulse of Baylor’s rage, an inconstant flow of heat eddying around him, intensifying his fear, rooting him to the spot. Baylor laid the gun down, laid it down with the tenderness he might have shown toward a sick child, and stepped over the retaining wall. The animal fluidity of the movements made Mingolla’s skin crawl. He managed to shuffle backward a pace and held up his hands to ward Baylor off. “C’mon, man,” he said weakly. Baylor let out a fuming noise—part hiss, part whimper—and a runner of saliva slid between his lips. The sun was a golden bath drenching the street, kindling glints and shimmers from every bright surface, as if it were bringing reality to a boil.

  Somebody yelled, “Get down, boy!”

  Then Baylor flew at him, and they fell together, rolling on the hard-packed dirt. Fingers dug in behind his Adam’s apple. He twisted away, saw Baylor grinning down, all staring eyes and yellowed teeth. Strings of drool flapping from his chin. A Halloween face. Knees pinned Mingolla’s shoulders, hands gripped his hair and bashed his head against the ground. Again, and again. A keening sound switched on inside his ears. He wrenched an arm free and tried to gouge Baylor’s eyes; but Baylor bit his thumb, gnawing at the joint. Mingolla’s vision dimmed, and he couldn’t hear anything anymore. The back of his head felt mushy. It seemed to be rebounding very slowly from the dirt, higher and slower after each impact. Framed by blue sky, Baylor’s face looked to be receding, spiraling off. And then, just as Mingolla began to fade, Baylor disappeared.

  Dust was in Mingolla’s mouth, his nostrils. He heard shouts, grunts. Still dazed, he propped himself onto an elbow. A short way off, khaki arms and legs and butts were thrashing around in a cloud of dust. Like a comic-strip fight. You expected asterisks and exclamation points overhead to signify profanity. Somebody grabbed his arm, hauled him upright. The MP captain, his beefy face flushed. He frowned reprovingly as he brushed dirt from Mingolla’s clothes. “Real gutsy, boy,” he said. “And real, real stupid. He hadn’t been at the end of his run, you’d be drawin’ flies ’bout now.” He turned to a sergeant standing nearby. “How stupid you reckon that was, Phil?”

  The sergeant said that it beat him.

  “Well,” the captain said, “I figger if the boy here was in combat, that’d be ’bout Bronze Star stupid.”

  That, allowed the sergeant, was pretty goddamn stupid.

  “’Course here in Frisco”—the captain gave Mingolla a final dusting—“it don’t get you diddley-shit.”

  The MPs were piling off Baylor, who lay on his side, bleeding from his nose and mouth. Blood as thick as gravy filmed over his cheeks.

  “Panama,” said Mingolla dully. Maybe it was an option. He saw how it would be…a night beach, palm shadows a lacework on the white sand.

  “What say?” asked the captain.

  “He wanted to go to Panama,” said Mingolla.

  “Don’t we all,” said the captain.

  One of the MPs rolled Baylor onto his stomach and handcuffed him; another manacled his feet. Then they rolled him back over. Yellow dirt had mired with the blood on his cheeks and forehead, hitting him with a blotchy mask. His eyes snapped open in the middle of that mask, widening when he felt the restraints. He started to hump up and down, trying to bounce his way to freedom. He kept on humping for almost a minute; then he went rigid and—his gone eyes fixed on the molten disc of the sun—he let out a roar. That was the only word for it. I
t wasn’t a scream or a shout, but a devil’s exultant roar, so loud and full of fury it seemed to be generating all the blazing light-and-heat dance. Listening to it had a seductive effect, and Mingolla began to get behind it, to feel it in his body like a good rock ’n’ roll tune, to sympathize with its life-hating exuberance.

  “Whoo-ee!” said the captain, marveling. “They gon’ have to build a whole new zoo for that boy.”

  After giving his statement and letting a corpsman check his head, Mingolla caught the ferry to meet Debora on the east bank. He sat in the stern, gazing out at the unfinished bridge, this time unable to derive from it any sense of hope or magic. Panama kept cropping up in this thoughts. Now that Baylor was gone, was it really an option? He knew he should try to figure things out, plan what to do, but he couldn’t stop seeing Baylor’s bloody, demented face. He’d seen worse, Christ yes, a whole lot worse, guys reduced to spare parts, so little of them left that they didn’t need a shiny silver coffin, just a black metal can the size of a cookie jar. Guys scorched and one-eyed and bloody, clawing blindly at the air like creatures out of a monster movie, but the idea of Baylor trapped forever in some raw, red place inside his brain, in the heart of that raw, red noise he’d made, maybe that idea was worse than anything Mingolla had seen. He didn’t want to die; he rejected the prospect with the impassioned stubbornness a child displays when confronted with a hard truth. Yet he would rather die than endure madness. Compared to what Baylor had in store, death and Panama seemed to offer the same peaceful sweetness.

  Someone sat down beside Mingolla: a kid who couldn’t have been older than eighteen. A new kid with a new haircut, new boots, new fatigues. Even his face looked new, freshly broken from the mold. Shiny, pudgy cheeks; clear skin; bright, unused blue eyes. He was eager to talk. He asked Mingolla about his home, his family, and said, “Oh, wow, it must be great living in New York, wow.” But he appeared to have some other reason for initiating the conversation, something he was leading up to, and finally he spat it out.

  “You know the Sammy that went animal back there?” he said, “I seen him pitted last night. Little place in the jungle west of the base. Guy name Chaco owns it. Man, it was fuckin’ incredible!”

  Mingolla had only heard of the pits third-and fourth-hand, but what he had heard was bad, and it was hard to believe that this kid with his air of home-boy innocence could be an aficionado of something so vile. And, despite what he had just witnessed, it was even harder to believe that Baylor could have been a participant.

  The kid didn’t need prompting. “It was pretty early on,” he said. “There’d been a coupla bouts, nothin’ special, and then this guy walks in lookin’ real twitchy. I knew he was Sammy by the way he’s starin’ at the pit, y’know, like it’s somethin’ he’s been wishin’ for. And this guy with me, friend of mine, he gives me a poke and says, ‘Holy shit! That’s the Black Knight, man! I seen him fight over in Réunion a while back. Put your money on him,’ he says. ‘The fucker’s an ace!’”

  Their last R and R had been in Réunion. Mingolla tried to frame a question but couldn’t think of one whose answer would have any meaning.

  “Well,” said the kid, “I ain’t been down long, but I’d even heard ’bout the Knight. So I went over and kinda hung out near him, thinkin’ maybe I can get a line on how he’s feelin’, y’know, ’cause you don’t wanna just bet the guy’s rep. Pretty soon Chaco comes over and asks the Knight if he wants some action. The Knight says, ‘Yeah, but I wanna fight an animal. Somethin’ fierce, man. I wanna fight somethin’ fierce.’ Chaco says he’s got some monkeys and shit, and the Knight says he hears Chaco’s got a jaguar. Chaco, he hems and haws, says maybe so, maybe not, but it don’t matter ’cause a jaguar’s too strong for Sammy. And the Knight tells Chaco who he is. Lemme tell ya, Chaco’s whole fuckin’ attitude changed. He could see how the bettin’ was gonna go for somethin’ like the Black Knight versus a jaguar. And he goes, like, ‘Yes, sir, Mister Black Knight, sir! Anything you want!’ And he makes the announcement. Man, the place goes nuts. People wavin’ money, screamin’ odds, drinkin’ fast so’s they can get ripped in time for the main event, and the Knight’s just standin’ there, smilin’, like he’s feedin’ off the confusion. Then Chaco lets the jaguar in through the tunnel and into the pit. It ain’t a full-growed jaguar, half-growed maybe. But that’s all you figure even the Knight can handle.”

  The kid paused for breath; his eyes seemed to have grown brighter. “Anyway, the jaguar’s sneakin’ ’round and ’round, keepin’ close to the pit wall, snarlin’ and spittin’, and the Knight’s watchin’ him from up above, checkin’ his moves, y’know. And everybody starts chantin’, ‘Sam-mee, Sam-mee, Sam-mee,’ and after the chant builds up loud the Knight pulls three ampules outta his pocket. I mean, shit, man! Three! I ain’t never been ’round Sammy when he’s done more’n two. Three gets you clear into the fuckin’ sky! So when the Knight holds up these three ampules, the crowd’s tuned to burn, howlin’ like they’s playin’ Sammy themselves. But the Knight, man, he keeps his cool. He is so cool! He just holds up the ampules and lets ’em take the shine, soakin’ up the noise and energy, gettin’ strong off the crowd’s juice. Chaco waves everybody quiet and gives the speech, y’know, ’bout how in the heart of every man there’s a warrior-soul waitin’ to be loosed and shit. I tell ya, man, I always thought that speech was crap before, but the Knight’s makin’ me buy it a hunnerd percent. He is so goddamn cool! He takes off his shirt and shoes, and he ties this piece of black silk ’round his arm. Then he pops the ampules, one after another, real quick, and breathes it all in. I can see it hittin’, catchin’ fire in his eyes. Pumpin’ him up. And soon as he’s popped the last one, he jumps into the pit. He don’t use the tunnel, man! He jumps! Twenty-five feet down to the sand, and lands in a crouch.”

  Three other soldiers were leaning in, listening, and the kid was now addressing all of them, playing to his audience. He was so excited that he could barely keep his speech coherent, and Mingolla realized with disgust that he, too, was excited by the image of Baylor crouched on the sand. Baylor, who had cried after the assault. Baylor, who had been so afraid of snipers that he had once pissed in his pants rather than walk from his gun to the latrine.

  Baylor, the Black Knight.

  “The jaguar’s screechin’ and snarlin’ and slashin’ at the air,” the kid went on. “Tryin’ to put fear into the Knight. ’Cause the jaguar knows in his mind the Knight’s big trouble. This ain’t some jerk like Chaco, this is Sammy. The Knight moves to the center of the pit, still in a crouch.” Here the kid pitched his voice low and dramatic. “Nothin’ happens for a coupla minutes, ’cept it’s tense. Nobody’s hardly breathin’. The jaguar springs a coupla times, but the Knight dances off the side and makes him miss, and there ain’t no damage either way. Whenever the jaguar springs, the crowd sighs and squeals, not just ’cause they’s scared of seein’ the Knight tore up, but also ’cause they can see how fast he is. Silky fast, man! Unreal. He looks ’bout as fast as the jaguar. He keeps on dancin’ away, and no matter how the jaguar twists and turns, no matter if he comes at him along the sand, he can’t get his claws into the Knight. And then, man…oh, it was so smooth! Then the jaguar springs again, and this time ’stead of dancin’ away, the Knight drops onto his back, does this half-roll onto his shoulders, and when the jaguar passes over him, he kicks up with both feet. Kicks up hard! And smashes his heels into the jaguar’s side. The jaguar slams into the pit wall and comes down screamin’, snappin’ at his ribs. They was busted, man. Pokin’ out the skin like tent posts.”

  The kid wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and flicked his eyes toward Mingolla and the other soldiers to see if they were into the story. “We was shoutin’, man,” he said. “Poundin’ the top of the pit wall. It was so loud, the guy I’m with is yellin’ in my ear and I can’t hear nothin’. Now maybe it’s the noise, maybe it’s his ribs, whatever…the jaguar goes berserk. Makin’ these scuttlin’ lunges at the Knight, tryin’
to get close ’fore he springs so the Knight can’t pull that same trick. He’s snarlin’ like a goddamn chain saw! The Knight keeps leapin’ and spinnin’ away. But then he slips, man, grabs the air for balance, and the jaguar’s on him, clawin’ at his chest. For a second they’re like waltzin’ together. Then the Knight pries loose the paw that’s hooked him, pushes the jaguar’s head back, and smashes his fist into the jaguar’s eye. The jaguar flops onto the sand, and the Knight scoots to the other side of the pit. He’s checkin’ the scratches on his chest, which is bleedin’ wicked. Meantime, the jaguar gets to his feet, and he’s fucked up worse than ever. His one eye’s fulla blood, and his hindquarters is all loosey-goosey. Like if this was boxin’, they’d call in the doctor. The jaguar figures he’s had enough of this crap, and he starts tryin’ to jump outta the pit. This one time he jumps right up to where I’m leanin’ over the edge. Comes so close I can smell his breath, I can see myself reflected in his good eye. He’s clawin’ for a grip, wantin’ to haul hisself up into the crowd. People are freakin’, thinkin’ he might be gonna make it. But ’fore he gets the chance, the Knight catches him by the tail and slings him against the wall. Just like you’d beat a goddamn rug, that’s how he’s dealin’ with the jaguar. And the jaguar’s a real mess now. He’s quiverin’. Blood’s pourin’ outta his mouth, his fangs is all red. The Knight starts makin’ these little feints, wavin’ his arms, growlin’. He’s toyin’ with the jaguar. People don’t believe what they’re seein’, man. Sammy’s kickin’ a jaguar’s ass so bad he’s got room to toy with it. If the place was nuts before, now it’s a fuckin’ zoo. Fights in the crowd, guys singin’ the Marine Hymn. Some beaner squint’s takin’ off her clothes. The jaguar tries to scuttle up close to the Knight again, but he’s too fucked up. He can’t keep it together. And the Knight, he’s still growlin’ and feintin’. A guy behind me is booin’, claimin’ the Knight’s defamin’ the purity of the sport by playin’ with the jaguar. But hell, man, I can see he’s just timin’ the jaguar, waitin’ for the right moment, the right move.”