“David?” She warped his name, gulping the syllables as if trying to swallow and talk at once.
Frog voice, devil voice.
He whirled around, caught an eyeful of black sky, spiky trees, and a pitted bone-knob moon trapped in a web of leaves and branches. Dark warty shapes of the huts, doors opening into yellow flame, with crooked shadow men inside. He blinked, shook his head. It wouldn’t vanish, it was real. What was this place? Not a village, naw, un-unh! A strangled grunt came from his throat, and he backed away, backed away from everything. She walked after him, croaking his name. Wig of black straw, shining dabs of jelly for eyes. Some of the shadow men were herky-jerked out of their doors, gathering behind her. Croaking. Long-legged, licorice-skinned demons with drumbeat hearts, faceless nothings from the dimension of sickness. They’d be on him in a flash.
“I see you,” he said, backing another few steps. “I know what you are.”
“No one’s trying to hurt you. It’s all right, David,” she said, and smiled.
She thought he’d buy that smile, but he wasn’t fooled. It broke over her face the way something rotten melts through the bottom of a grocery sack after it’s been in the garbage a week. Gloating smile of the Queen Devil Bitch. She had done this to him! Teamed up with the bad life in his hand and played witchy tricks on his head.
“I see you,” he said again, and tripped. Stumbled backward, clawing for balance, and going with his momentum, came up running toward the town.
Ferns whipped his legs, branches slashed at his face. Webs of shadow fettered the trail, and the shrilling insects had the sound of a metal edge being honed. He ran out of control, bashing into trees, nearly falling, his breath shrieking. But then he spotted a big moonstruck ceiba tree up ahead, standing on a rise overlooking the water. A grandfather tree, a white magic tree. It summoned him. He stopped beside it, sucking in air. The moonlight cooled him, drenched him in silver, and he thought he understood the purpose of the tree. Fountain of whiteness in the dark wood, shining for him alone. He made a fist of his left hand, and the thing inside it eeled frantically as if it knew what was coming. He studied the mystic grainy patterns of the bark, found their point of confluence. Steeled himself. Then he drove his fist into the trunk. Bright pain lanced up his arm, and he cried out. But he hit the trunk again, hit it a third time. He held the hand tight against his chest to muffle the pain, it was already swelling, becoming a knuckleless cartoon hand; but nothing moved inside it. The riverbank, with its shadows and rustlings, no longer menaced him, transformed into a place of ordinary lights and darks. Even the whiteness of the tree seemed diminished.
“David!” Debora’s voice, and not far off.
Part of him wanted to wait, to see whether she had changed for the innocent, for the ordinary. But he couldn’t trust her, couldn’t trust himself, and after a brief hesitation he took off running once again.
Mingolla caught the ferry to the west bank, thinking that he would find Gilbey, that a dose of Gilbey’s belligerence would ground him in reality. He sat in the bow next to a group of five other soldiers, one of whom was puking over the side, and to avoid a conversation he turned away and looked down into the black water slipping past. Moonlight edged the wavelets with silver, and among those crescent gleams it seemed he could see reflected the broken curve of his life: a kid living for Christmas, drawing pictures, receiving praise, growing up mindless to high school, sex, and drugs; growing beyond that, beginning to draw pictures again, and then, right where you might expect the curve to assume a more meaningful shape, it was sheared off, left hanging, its entire process demystified and explicable. He realized how foolish the idea of the ritual had been. Like a dying man clutching a vial of holy water, he had clutched at magic when the logic of existence had proved untenable. Now the frail linkages of that magic had been dissolved, and nothing supported him: he was falling through the dark zones of the war, waiting to be snatched by one of its monsters. He lifted his head and gazed at the west bank. The shore toward which he was heading was as black as a bat’s wing and inscribed with arcana of violent light. Rooftops and palms were cast in silhouette against a rainbow haze of neon; gassy arcs of bloodred and lime green and indigo were visible between them: fragments of glowing beasts. The wind bore screams and wild music. The soldiers beside him laughed and cursed, and the one guy kept on puking. Mingolla rested his forehead on the wooden rail, just to feel something solid.
At the Club Demonio, Gilbey’s big-breasted whore was sitting at the bar, staring into her drink. Mingolla pushed through the dancers, through heat and noise and veils of lavender smoke. When he walked up to her, the whore put on a professional smile and made a grab for his crotch. He fended her off and asked if she’d seen Gilbey. She looked befuddled at first, but then the light dawned. “Meengolla?” she said, and when he nodded, she fumbled in her purse and pulled out a folded paper. “Ees frawm Geel-bee. Forr me, five dol-larrs.”
He handed her the money and took the paper. It proved to be a Christian pamphlet with a pen-and-ink sketch of a rail-thin, aggrieved-looking Jesus on the front, and beneath the sketch, a tract whose opening line read, “The last days are in season.” He turned it over and found a handwritten note on the back. The note was pure Gilbey. No explanation, no sentiment. Just the basics:
I’m gone to Panama. You want to make that trip, check out a man in Livingston named Ruy Barros. He’ll fix you up. Maybe I’ll see you.
G.
Mingolla had believed that his confusion had peaked, but the fact of Gilbey’s desertion wouldn’t fit inside his head, and when he tried to make it fit, the rank and file of his thoughts was thrown into disarray. It wasn’t that he didn’t understand what had happened. He understood perfectly; in fact, he might have predicted it. Like a crafty rat who had seen his hole blocked by a trap, Gilbey had simply chewed a new hole and vanished into the woodwork. The thing that confused Mingolla was his total lack of reference. He and Gilbey and Baylor had triangulated reality, located one another within a coherent map of duties and places and events. Now that they both were gone, he felt utterly bewildered. Outside the club, he let the crowds push him along. Stared at the neon animals atop the bars. Giant blue rooster; golden turtle; green bull with fiery eyes. Great identities regarding his aimless course with dispassion. Bleeds of color washed from the signs, staining the air to a garish paleness, giving everyone a mealy complexion. Amazing, Mingolla thought, that you could breathe such grainy discolored stuff, that it didn’t start you choking. It was all amazing, all nonsensical. Everything he saw struck him as unique and unfathomable, even the most commonplace of sights. He found himself staring at people—whores, street kids, an MP who was patting the fender of his jeep as if it were his big olive-drab pet—and trying to figure out what they were really doing, what special significance their actions held for him, what clues they presented that might help him unravel the snarl of his own existence. At last, realizing that he needed peace and quiet, he set out toward the airbase, intending to find an empty bunk in some barracks. But when he reached the cutoff that led to the unfinished bridge, he turned down it, deciding that he wasn’t ready to deal with sentries and duty officers. Dense thickets abuzz with crickets narrowed the cutoff to a path, and at its end stood a line of sawhorses. He climbed over them and soon was mounting a sharply inclined curve that appeared to lead to a point not far below the oblate silvery moon.
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 throu
gh the exposed girders, tugging at his ankles. His hand throbbed and was fever-hot. Below, multicolored 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. 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, 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 at 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 pulled irresistibly 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 to stare at the sky, which had lightened to the vivid blue of a predawn darkness. Then he heard the whisper again and glanced over his shoulder. Strung out across the bridge about twenty feet away, a dozen or so children. Some crouched, some standing. Most were clad in rags, a few wore coverings of leaves and vines, and others were naked. Watchful; silent. They were all emaciated, their hair long and matted. Knives glinted in their hands. Recalling the dead children he had seen that morning, Mingolla was for a moment afraid. But only for a moment. Fear flared in him like a coal puffed alight by a breeze and died an instant later, suppressed not by any rational accommodation, but by a perception of these ragged figures as an opportunity for surrender. He had no desire to put forth more effort in the cause of survival. Survival, he had learned, was not the soul’s ultimate priority. He studied the children. The way they were posed reminded him of a Neanderthal grouping in the Museum of Natural History. The moon was still graphite. Finally Mingolla turned back to face the horizon, now showing as a distinct line of green darkness.
He had expected to be stabbed or pushed, to pinwheel down and break against Río Dulce, its water gone a steely color beneath the brightening sky. But instead, a voice spoke in his ear. “Hey, macho!”
Squatting beside him was a boy of fourteen or fifteen, his swarthy monkeylike face framed by tangles of shoulder-length black hair. Wearing tattered shorts. Coiled serpent tattooed on his brow. He peered at Mingolla, tipping his head first to one side, then the other, perplexed: he made a growly noise, held up a knife. Twisted it this way and that, letting Mingolla see its keen edge, how it channeled the moonlight along its grooved blade. An army-issue survival knife with a brass-knuckle grip. Mingolla gave an amused sniff.
The boy lowered the knife and nodded as if he had expected such a reaction. “What you doin’ here, man?” he asked.
Most of the answers that occurred to Mingolla demanded too much energy to voice. He chose the simplest. “I like the bridge,” he said.
Again the boy nodded. “The bridge is magic,” he said. “You know this?”
“There was a time I might have believed you,” Mingolla said.
“Talk slow,” said the boy. “Too fast, I can’t understan’.”
Mingolla repeated his comment, and the boy laughed. “Sure you believe it, man. Why else you here?” With a planing gesture of his hand, 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’ crossin’ the river, don’t mean the same t’ing a bridge means. You know what I’m sayin’?”
“Yeah,” said Mingolla, surprised to hear his own thoughts echoed by someone who so resembled a hominid.
“I come here,” said the boy, “and I listen to the wind. Hear it sing in the iron. And I know t’ings from it. I see the future.” He grinned, exposing blackened teeth, and pointed 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 an appropriate means of expressing his feelings. “You speak good English,” he said at last.
“Shit! What you t’ink? ’Cause we live in the jungle, we talk like animals? Shit!” The boy spat off the edge of the bridge. “I talk English all my life. Gringos, they too stupid to learn Spanish.”
A girl spoke behind them, her voice 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 the rest. Sunken cheeks, deep-set eyes. Ratty cables of hair hung down over her 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 lengthy response, punctuating his phrases by smashing the brass-knuckle grip of his knife against the concrete, striking sparks with every blow.
“Gracela,” the boy said to Mingolla, “she wanna 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?”
Mingolla waited.
“It’s the truth,” said the boy. He clasped his hands, enlaced his fingers, and twisted them to show how firmly locked they were. “You and death like this.”
“Maybe,” Mingolla said.
“No, it’s the truth,” the boy insisted. “The bridge tol’ me. Tol’ me I be t’ankful if I let you live. So you be t’ankful to the bridge, ’cause that magic you don’ believe, it save your ass.” He dropped out of his squat, swung his legs over the end of the bridge. “Gracela don’ care ’bout you live or die. She just goin’ ’gainst me ’cause when I leave, she’s goin’ to be chief, and she’s, you know, impatient.”
The girl met Mingolla’s gaze coldly: a witch-child with slitted eyes and bramble hair and ribs poking out. “Where you goin’?” he asked the boy.
“I dream I will live in the south,” said the boy. “I will own a warehouse full of gold and cocaine.”
The girl began to harangue him again, and he shouted back.
“What’s goin’ on?” Mingolla asked.
“More bullshit. I tell Gracela if she don’ stop, I goin’ to fuck her and t’row her in the river.” He winked at Mingolla, “Gracela she’s 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, forming into flocks above the river. The boy shook the hair from his eyes, sighed, and settled himself more comfortably. Mingolla saw that his chest was cross-hatched with ridged scars: knife wounds that hadn’t received proper treatment. Bits of vegetation were trapped in his hair, and some were actually tied in place by pieces of twine: primitive adornments.
“Tell me, gringo,” said the boy in a man-to-man tone of voice. “I hear in America there is a machine wit’ the soul of a man. This is true?”
“I guess that’s one way of lookin’ at it,” said Mingolla. “Yeah.”
The boy nodded gravely, his suspicions confirmed. “I hear also America has builded a metal worl’ in the sky.”
“They’re buildin’ it now.”
“And in the house of your president, is there a stone that holds the mind of a dead magician?”
“I doubt it,” said Mingolla after due consideration. “But who knows…maybe.”
The pink streaks in the
east were deepening to crimson, fanning wider. Shafts of light pierced upward to stain the bellies of some lowlying clouds to mauve. Several of the children began to mutter in unison: a chant. They were speaking Spanish, but their voices jumbled the words, making it sound guttural and malevolent, a language for trolls. Listening to the chant, Mingolla imagined them crouched around fires in bamboo thickets. Bloody knives lifted sunward over their fallen prey. Huddled together in the green nights amid Rousseau-like vegetation, while pythons with ember eyes coiled in the branches above.
“Shit, gringo,” said the boy. “This a weird motherfuckin’ time to be alive.” 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 Tio Moíses’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 Tio Moíses’s pilot had not the opportunity to display, that Mingolla himself—though the opportunity had been his with Psicorps—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.
Life During Wartime Page 9